Making Music is the Important Part. Documenting It is Not Nothing.
There are people who listen to music and then there are people who are obsessed with knowing everything about the music to which they are listening.
We need them both.
In the latter category, which is smaller than the former, we have Dan Morganstern, long-time director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers-Newark, who died Saturday in Manhattan at the age of 94. We also have Chris Strachwitz, founder of the Arhoolie record label, who died May 5 in San Rafael, California, age 91.
I have no idea if Morganstern and Strachwitz ever crossed paths. It’s likely they did, since they were both extraordinarily devoted and accomplished historians, archivists and documentarians of music created and played by black Americans.
Morganstern leaned toward jazz, while Strachwitz embraced a range of roots folk music from country blues to zydeco. Both wanted to know the stories of the artists who created that music, a marvelous idea because those stories are rarely less than fascinating. They also lead into the whole web of how music was recorded and disseminated, and therefore how it was absorbed into the wider American culture.
Most of the music on which they focused was rarely heard on top-40 radio, since Lightning Hopkins and Coleman Hawkins tend to be acquired tastes. That makes them no less a part of the American cultural fabric, because recordings and songs that enchant the mainstream and later are featured in malt beverage commercials do not suddenly pop out of the ground like mushrooms after a spring rain. They are synthesized by writers, producers and artists who consciously or subconsciously are drawing on what came before.
Historians and archivists like Dan Morganstern and Chris Strachwitz document the nuts and bolts, putting it down on vinyl or paper so the threads will not be lost. True, most people who listen to music care more about the immediate experience than the backstory, and that’s fine. But the backstory still matters.
The first time I talked to Dan Morganstern, it was about a friend of his, the late Len Kunstadt, who for years published a magazine called Record Research that poked into every corner of black roots music, primarily jazz and blues.
“I knew Len for 50 years,” Morganstern said. “He was very important figure in the somewhat arcane community of history and discography. On his level there are probably a hundred people, maximum.
“He loved talking to old musicians to get their stories. He saved everything. He was never satisfied until something was established as a fact.”
Funny how sometimes the things you say about someone else are also true about yourself.
Chris Strachwitz ran a record store called Down Home Records in El Cerrito, California, where he featured the artists he recorded for Arhoolie, a small sampling of whom would include Hopkins, Mance Lipscomb, Clifton Chenier, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Snooks Eaglin, Big Mama Thornton, Elizabeth Cotton, the Klezmorim and Beausoleil.
He traveled around the country to track down many of these artists, and he financed this life in a couple of ways. The main way was from Country Joe McDonald’s “Fish Cheer Rag,” which McDonald recorded on Strachwitz’s equipment in return for royalty rights.
On his travels Strachwitz also scoured old record stores, flea markets, junk shops and the like for vintage 78 rpm records, which he kept in a different room from the main Down Home display and sold in the collectors’ market. My friend Galen and I visited his shop in 1970 and he explained that he’d be happy to let us look through that stash with the understanding they were a dollar apiece and we had to buy at least 100.
We did, from shelves that held thousands of 78s salvaged from the obscurity into which they had fallen.
He lived long enough to be recognized for this level of devotion. In 2016, the Recording Academy gave him the Grammys Trustees Award. He was also inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame and awarded a National Heritage Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts.
For his part, he endowed the Arhoolie Foundation “to document, preserve, present and disseminate authentic traditional and regional vernacular music.” The Foundation’s holdings, which are available to the public at UCLA, include his collection of more than 44,000 records.
That’s a good parallel to the work Morganstern was doing on the other coast both at the Institute of Jazz Studies and elsewhere. He eventually won eight Grammys for liner notes, which were master classes on artists like Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller and Art Tatum.
And one other thing also made me think of Chris Strachwitz when I saw that Dan Morganstern had died.
For all their love of and contributions to American music, neither was a native American. Both were born in Germany and came here as young men, arriving in New York in 1947. Both were also driven out of Europe, which is the point at which their stories diverge rather sharply.
Morganstern’s family was Jewish and living in Austria, as his New York Times obituary noted, when the Nazis annexed that country in 1938. Morganstern’s father caught one of the last trains to France while he and his mother fled to Denmark. They were then smuggled into Sweden, where they survived the war before the family was finally reunited in New York.
Dan joined the U.S. Army in 1951 and graduated from Brandeis, after which he worked at newspapers before sliding over into music magazines like Downbeat. He would eventually write thousands of music articles and befriend many of the artists about whom he wrote.
Strachwitz’s family, conversely, was of royal German stock. His father, officially a count, served in the German military during World War II as a game warden, which Chris Strachwitz’s son Hubert told the Times had him escorting troop trains to Italy.
When the Russians arrived in February 1945, the family fled by train, tractor and horse and buggy. After they reunited in New York, Chris went on to serve in the U.S. Army and graduate from Berkeley. He taught school before he figured out a way to make a living from record collecting.
Turning your passion into a viable career is as good as it gets. With Dan Morganstern and Chris Strachwitz, it also worked out well for the music.
