Warren Hellman hired Debby McClatchy to perform at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival several times; and on April 18, 2006, as Lotta Crabtree at a pre-dawn commemoration of the San Francisco earthquake, so Debby thinks Warren Hellman was quite wonderful.

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Here's the obituary from the New York Times

Warren Hellman, 77, Investor Who Loved Bluegrass, Dies

PETER LATTMAN

Published: December 19, 2011

Warren Hellman, a Wall Street investor who was president of Lehman Brothers and whose passion for bluegrass inspired him to create a San Francisco music festival that draws hundreds of thousands of people a year, died on Sunday in San Francisco. He was 77.

The cause was complications of leukemia, according to a spokeswoman for Hellman & Freidman, the investment firm he co-founded.

Mr. Hellman, whose parents came from two prominent San Francisco families, had a finance career on both coasts. After nearly 20 years at Lehman in New York, he started several money management businesses, including Hellman & Friedman in San Francisco, one of the country’s most successful private equity funds.

More recently Mr. Hellman focused on philanthropy, bestowing millions of dollars on cultural, educational and medical charities in the Bay Area.

The three-day concert he founded, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, held each year in Golden Gate Park, has been financed entirely by him.

Wiry, impish and informal — he favored frayed khakis and cowboy shirts — Mr. Hellman was something of a free spirit. He traveled around the country with his bluegrass band, the Wronglers, performing with them as recently as October. An accomplished endurance athlete, he twice completed a 100-mile running race through the Sierra Nevada mountains.

“Warren was an individualist,” said James D. Wolfensohn, the former president of the World Bank and a business-school classmate of Mr. Hellman’s. “He had the confidence and access that comes along with being from a prominent family, but never rested on his laurels and lived the life he wanted.”

Frederick Warren Hellman was born on July 25, 1934, in Manhattan. He was not, as many assumed, an heir to the Hellmann’s mayonnaise fortune; his pedigree was in the finance and rag trades. His father was Marco F. Hellman, an investment banker. His mother was the former Ruth Koshland, whose relatives were prosperous wool merchants in California.

His great-grandfather, Isaias W. Hellman, was a Jewish immigrant from Bavaria who became one of California’s leading financiers and served as president of Wells Fargo Nevada National Bank, which later became Wells Fargo.

Mr. Hellman grew up in San Francisco and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, where he played varsity water polo. After graduating from Harvard Business School in 1959, he joined Lehman Brothers, where his uncle, Frederick L. Ehrman, was a senior executive and later chairman.

An aggressive dealmaker at Lehman, Mr. Hellman earned the nickname Hurricane Hellman. At 26, he became the youngest partner in the firm’s history, and in 1973, at 39, president. The firm’s partners ousted Mr. Ehrman that year, and Mr. Hellman had to deliver the news to his uncle.

In Ken Auletta’s 1985 book, “Greed and Glory on Wall Street: The Fall of the House of Lehman,” Mr. Hellman is quoted as saying that he couldn’t recall the expression on Mr. Ehrman’s face because he had stared at his uncle’s feet for the entire conversation. (He clearly remembered that Mr. Ehrman’s socks were gray and bunched around his ankles, however.)

After leaving Lehman in 1977, Mr. Hellman moved to Boston, where he helped start two investment firms: Hellman, Jordan, a manager of stock portfolios; and a venture capital fund that invested in start-up technology companies. That fund, now called Matrix Partners, was an early backer of Apple Computer.

After moving back to San Francisco, Mr. Hellman and Tully Friedman, an investment banker at Salomon Brothers, started Hellman & Friedman in 1984. He said he had set out to build a firm that did the exact opposite of Lehman, which he described as nasty and corrosive.

With Hellman & Friedman he orchestrated its buyout of Levi Strauss as well as its investments in the Nasdaq and the advertising company Young & Rubicam. Today the firm’s holdings include the media companies Getty Images and Nielsen.

Until recently Mr. Hellman arose daily at 4:30 a.m. for a 16-mile run through the Presidio before heading into the office. He was a five-time age group national champion in ride and tie, a combination of cross-country running and horseback riding. In the 1970s he co-founded the Stratton Mountain School in Vermont for competitive junior skiers and later served as president of the United States ski team.

He gradually turned over the management of Hellman & Friedman to his partners and concentrated on civic pursuits, among them the construction of an underground parking garage in Golden Gate Park and providing the financial backing for The Bay Citizen, a nonprofit local news organization that provides content to The New York Times.

Banjo picking and bluegrass were his longtime loves, and in 2001 he hosted a one-day free concert featuring Emmylou Harris and Alison Krauss. Hardly Strictly Bluegrass is now a three-day event that draws more than 750,000 people a year, its organizers say. And it offers more than bluegrass; the rock stars Elvis Costello, Patti Smith and John Mellencamp have been among the performers. It has also featured the Wronglers, Mr. Hellman’s band, which released an album this year, “Heirloom Music,” with Jimmie Dale Gilmore.

Last week, city officials renamed Speedway Meadow, the site of the festival, Hellman’s Hollow.

Mr. Hellman’s wife of 56 years, Chris, survives him, as do four children, Mick, Tricia Gibbs, Frances Hellman and Judith Hellman; 12 grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.

In 2009, Mr. Hellman and his daughter Tricia, a doctor, celebrated a joint bar and bat mitzvah, ceremonies typically for 13-year-olds. Though he began studying the Torah in the 1980s, Mr. Hellman grew up secular, and neither he nor his children or grandchildren had had a bar mitzvah.

Mr. Hellman told a local Jewish weekly newspaper that the ritual — during which he wore a yarmulke bearing a “Cal” logo, an homage to his alma mater — had connected him to his past.

“After 75 years, I have come home,” he said.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 21, 2011

An obituary on Tuesday about Warren Hellman, the Wall Street investor and patron of bluegrass music, misspelled the name of the mayonnaise company that some mistakenly assumed his family founded. It is Hellmann’s, not Hellman’s.