New Book Provides Lively History Of Rounder Records and Roots Music Canon
When aspiring fiddle player. Alison Krauss played a record on the Rounder Records label, she knew she wanted to make one someday for them. Years later when a young Sierra Hull saw a Rounder logo on the backs of albums made by her heroes Krauss and Tony Rice, she dreamed of recording for Rounder someday.
Long before Americana was considered a genre, there was Rounder Records. Originated in the early Seventies by three friends who met at college in Boston, Rounder Records emerged to become the largest independent label and brought a slew of roots music to the market over six decades and along the way made stars out of Norman Blake, George Thorogood, Alison Krauss, Bela Fleck, Billy Strings and Sierra Farrell.
In his new book Oh, Didn’t They Ramble (Rounder Records and the Transformation of American a Roots Music), author David Menconi does a masterful job of documenting the impact of the roots music label that started as it’s three founders sold records out of their van at bluegrass festivals and from the basement of their house. Along the way they issued a plethora of obscure titles and reissues of out-of-print titles that helped to define the roots canon.
Menconi captures the unlikely path of graduate students who coalesced around the burgeoning folk scene at Club 47 in Boston. Ken Irwin, whose father took him as a child on a visit to interview famed deejay Alan Freed, teamed with roommate Bill Nowlin to put up flyers promoting concerts on campus in exchange for free tickets. They met and were joined by Marian Leighton. She grew up poor in rural Maine but had a passion for literature and struck up a conversation with Irwin as he was reading a book about blues.
Irwin’s father left a big impression and said everybody who is into folk music should have at least one bluegrass record. When Irwin’s dissertation on female roles in country songs from 1925-35 was not accepted, he turned to his passion and fell into the music business with Rounder co-founders Nowlin and Leighton.
As a self-described “anti-profit collective” born out of the post-Sixties hippie culture, the Rounder roots music aficionados stumbled into a business they knew nothing about. Ironically the eventual success of the label flew in the face of their original mission statement. In it they portrayed themselves as a “service organization” to “make available important traditions of American culture that are largely non-commercial.”
The founders chose the name based Rounder based on a definition of a “well-oiled traveler who made the rounds.” The word is closely related, as Menconi points out, to a rambler, someone who roved far and wide and never settled down.
The book captures the self-effacing humor of the Rounder founders. Menconi makes the point that they didn’t know what they were doing but were serious. Along the way they largely made it up. Menconi’s analysis of Rounder’s “try anything” philosophy explains how George Thorogood came to the label. After persistent prodding by a school bus driver who was an ardent fan, Rounder initially resisted before signing the guitarist who didn’t fit the mold but had been rebuffed by every other label. He became the label’s first bonafide star.
“As a man of few words, just let me say Rounder Records made me, and vice-y verse-y,” Thorogood is quoted on the back dust jacket.
Readers will revel in the anecdotes sprinkled throughout the book about the founders and their times. The events that led to Thorogood’s discovery and Robert Plant’s call to Allison Krauss will have you in stitches.
Today, Rounder is part of the Concord Music Group which started as a specialty jazz label that Rounder once distributed. The book looks at the founders who by their own admission aged-out and came to the realization that “A&R’s a young man’s business and we were lucky to do it as long as we did.” Now Concord grapples with honoring the Rounder ethos and legacy against the modern music business they helped to create. The loss of Allison Krauss after three decades is a painful chapter in the label’s history and it’s not surprising that Strings left for a bigger label.
But perhaps the impact of Rounder can be most felt in the lives Nowlin, Leighton and Irwin impacted. Jim Lauderdale was once a teenager who attended the Old Time Fiddler’s Convention in North Carolina. Inspired to play the banjo, Lauderdale met Irwin and Leighton who were selling records out of their van, including some from their new label. They made a few recommendations and as Menconi writes, it was enough to send him on his way.
“I sometimes wonder what my musical trajectory would have been without them,” Lauderdale says some fifty years later.
For more information on Oh, Didn’t They Ramble, visit the University of North Carolina Press at: http://www.uncpress.org
And for information on Rounder, check out their website here: https://store.rounder.com
