By 1969, McDonald was leading Country Joe McDonald and the Fish and one song from the Arhoolie sessions, the anti-war anthem “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag,” was a highlight of the Woodstock festival and soundtrack.Īrhoolie releases were cherished by blues fans in England, including Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. In the mid-1960s, he recorded an album in his living room for no charge by Berkeley-based folk performer Joe McDonald, who in turn granted publishing rights to Arhoolie. Strachwitz despised most commercial music - “mouse music,” he called it - but he did have just enough success to keep Arhoolie going. He founded Arhoolie in 1960 and over the following decades traveled to Mississippi, Texas and Louisiana among other states on a mission that rarely relented: taping little-known artists in their home environments, be it a dance hall, a front porch, a beer joint, a backyard. Strachwitz, recipient in 2016 of a Grammy Trustee Award, passed away Friday from complications with congestive heart failure at an assisted living facility in the San Francisco Bay Area’s Marin County, the Arhoolie Foundation said Saturday.Īdmired by Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt and many others, Strachwitz was an unlikely champion of the American vernacular - a native German born into privilege who fell deeply for his adopted country’s music and was among the most intrepid field recorders to emerge after Alan Lomax.

NEW YORK (AP) - Chris Strachwitz, a producer, musicologist and one-man preservation society whose Arhoolie Records released thousands of songs by regional performers and comprised an extraordinary American archive that became known and loved worldwide, has died.

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