Last month, one of the great explorers and producers of American vernacular music, Chris Strachwitz, passed away. He was 91 years old. He was the founder and co-owner (with Tom Diamant) of Arhoolie Records which since its first release in 1960, Texas Sharecropper And Songster by Texan bluesman Mance Lipscomb, has put out an astonishing 44,000 records.
In 2016, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings purchased Arhoolie. More than 350 albums released since 1960 were added to Folkways catalogue, and the music they presented included down home blues, folk, jazz, country, gospel, Cajun, zydeco, Mexican-American (see the Frontera Collection at Smithsonian), klezmer and World Music. Much of the Arhoolie catalogue has now been digitised and reissued on CD.
Born in Germany in 1931, Strachwitz emigrated to the USA in 1947 and studied science and engineering, then politics. He quickly discovered jazz and began collecting records -- he had one of the largest private collections of records in the US and developed the largest archive of Mexican-American music in the country.
