Richard Weize

Richard Weize was born on 4 August 1945 in Bad Gandersheim, then in the Free State of Brunswick, Germany. His family had run a bookbinding business and a book and stationery shop in the town since 1845, and he grew up surrounded by books. As a child he discovered Bill Haley and rock and roll on the American Forces Network, and his enthusiasm soon turned into a deep and lasting love of American country music, then still called hillbilly.

Using the family bookshop, he ordered records of his heroes directly from the United States and paid for his hobby by taking orders from other collectors. By around 1960 he had become a small scale importer of hard to find country and rock and roll albums, the beginning both of his own collection and of the business that became Bear Family Records. After leaving school in 1960 he trained briefly in an iron foundry and then as a window dresser.

In the mid 1960s Weize became a wine salesman, and in 1966 the firm sent him to England, where he lived for about five years. The Wembley Country Music Festival of 1968 rekindled his collecting passion. Back in Germany he worked as a sales representative for printed matter and in 1971 co-founded the small label Folk Variety, which issued new recordings by Bill Clifton and Carl T. Sprague.

In 1975 he gave up his sales job and founded Bear Family Records, at first a mail order business for imported records whose catalogues he typed himself. The label's first big success was The Unissued Johnny Cash in 1978. American companies had little interest in their own back catalogues at the time, and Weize and a handful of European enthusiasts rescued large amounts of unreleased material.

In 1980 Bear Family issued its first LP box set, and the box became its trademark: each record in its own coloured sleeve, carefully restored sound and large companion books with biographies, discographies, session details and photographs. A Bill Haley box set the standard for later retrospectives. Over 35 years Weize produced about 300 box sets and well over 2,000 releases on the label, working with collaborators such as Colin Escott, Hank Davis, Martin Hawkins and Tony Russell. He extended the label's scope to historical German subjects, including the 11 CD set Vorbei, Beyond Recall, documenting Jewish musical life in Berlin from 1933 to 1938, and series on political cabaret, workers' songs, German chanson and the Burg Waldeck festivals.

Weize withdrew from day to day management and at the end of 2014 sold Bear Family Records GmbH to two long serving employees. He continued to compile releases, ran the download label and more bears, founded in the early 2000s, and in 2016 launched the Richard Weize Archives label. He became a partner in the Klaus Kuhnke Archive for Popular Music in Bremen in 1998 and edited or co-wrote books including 1000 Nadelstiche, a discography of Creole music of the French West Indies and the LONDON Label Lexikon.

Weize had five children from his first two marriages. From 1994 he lived with his third wife, Birgit, in Vollersode near Bremen. He described himself as a rather crazy collector who kept everything from Disney comics, pinball machines and jukeboxes to country memorabilia such as a hat that had belonged to Hank Williams. He liked to say he worked 18 hours a day, every day of the year, and regarded his work as a privilege rather than a job.

Richard Weize died on 13 November 2026, aged 81. His death was announced by Bear Family Records in an obituary published on 14 November 2026, which said that his passion for collecting, researching and publishing had driven him until the end. The cause of death and the place of death were not made public. The label offered its sympathy to his wife, Birgit Niels, and to his children and grandchildren.

Weize is remembered as one of the most important archivists of recorded popular music. His box sets set new standards for reissues, with a depth of research that often resembled scholarly publishing, and they preserved the work of famous and forgotten performers alike. At the presentation of his Federal Cross of Merit, the entertainer Götz Alsmann compared his work to that of Ludwig von Köchel, whose catalogue is fundamental to the study of Mozart. Bear Family and Weize received many awards, including Goldmine awards, a W. C. Handy Award, many ARSC Awards for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research, nine German Record Critics' Awards and an Echo for outstanding contributions to music.