Archivist and Bear Family Records Founder Richard Weize Has Died

Leave it to a record enthusiast in Germany to be one of the most important people in country and roots music history for preserving, cataloging, promoting, distributing, and creating a passion for music that otherwise might have never even been heard by the world.

His name was Richard Weize, and among the many hats he wore and accomplishments he accrued, he was the founder, owner, and proprietor of Bear Family Records for decades. What started out as a way to feed his own insatiable appetite for American country, rock, and roots records turned into an international business, and one of the most important legacies of preservation ever undertaken in music, right up there with Ralph Peer and the Lomax Family.

Richard Weize was born on August 4, 1945, in Bad Gandersheim, Germany to a family that operated a book and stationary store. Along with being a bookworm, his proximity to American service members stationed in the country in the aftermath of WW2 gave Weize access to Armed Forces Radio. When he first heard Bill Haley and the Comets, he fell in love. Soon he was ordering albums from the United States, and to fund this enterprise, he also started selling these imports to other collectors.

Traditional country music became the preferred poison of Richard Weize, but really anything from the United States recorded between 1920 and 1970 is what he was passionate about, including rock, jazz, and blues. After launching a successful import business, Weize spied a hole in the market. Though he couldn’t sign American artists to label deals, he learned about reams of unreleased songs from music legends to more obscure artists just sitting on the shelves of labels and studios unheard.

In 1978, Richard Weize issued his first significant album that wasn’t just an import called The Unissued Johnny Cash. The album did so well, listeners in the United States began importing the music back to where it was from. Frustrated at the limited capacity of the two-sided LP, Bear Family issued its first box set in 1980. Though the company wasn’t the first to the box set concept, they revolutionized, popularized, and defined it when it came to quality, including very extensive liner notes, full-color photo sleeves, and often LP-sized books that contained histories and biographies of the performers.

Bear Family box sets weren’t just collections of music. The were archival achievements, often with Richard Weize writing or compiling much of the material himself. Instead of just relying on the name recognition of big stars, Bear Family could also discover virtually unknown local and regional artists, and completely revitalize their catalog, including often doing audio mastering work to present the music in its best form. Soon came compilations that featured various artists exploring an era, a region, a musical style, or other theme.

Some of the artists whose legacies were graced with Bear Family box sets from the country realm include Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings, Bob Wills, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, David Allan Coe, Chet Atkins, Porter Wagoner, Dolly Parton, The Carter Family, Slim Whitman, and Merle Travis. One 16-CD box set for Jim Reeves issued in 1996 included 75 previously-unheard songs, along with numerous demo recordings.

Though Bear Family became a profitable commercial business with multiple employees, archival preservation was always its main focus, thanks to the vision and leadership of Richard Weize. He was said to work 18 hours a day, seven days a week. He saw it as a privilege to be able to work with music for a living, and never took it for granted. Over the 35 years that he operated Bear Family, Weize was credited as a producer on over 2,000 releases, including almost 300 of the company’s legendary box sets.

Richard Weize also became revered as a music writer, and contributed articles to Rolling Stone, The Los Angeles Times, and many other publications over the years, including outlets in Germany. Multiple Bear Family albums were also nominated for Grammy Awards. Along with a litany of awards and accolades that Weize accrued over the years in Germany, he was awarded the prestigious “W.C. Handy Award” by the Blues Foundation. In 2021, he was given the Cross of the Order of Merit by the German President.

In the 2000s, Richard Weize started stepping back from day-to-day operations at Bear Family to solely focus on developing new projects. Then in 2014, he sold off the business to two long-time employees. This also coincided with the digital revolution in music that saw consumers interacting less and less with physical media. But even after his supposed retirement from Bear Family, Weize continued his archival and preservation work. Though he was famous worldwide for his work with American music, Weize was also instrumental in preserving many works of German music as well.

Richard Weize passed away on Friday, November 13th at the age of 81. Often when someone passes, we love to say they leave a legacy behind that will be lasting. But for Richard Weize this is beyond flattery. Leaving music behind that otherwise might have never been heard or loved was his passion and his life’s purpose. And few in the modern era contributed more to that pursuit than Richard Weize.

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