THE READING ROOM: Rounder Records’ Music-First Recipe for Success

Ken Irwin was born a ramblin’ man, searching out the music where its notes filled the air at old-time gatherings and festivals. In the early 1970s, he and his partner Marian Leighton staked out a claim on picnic tables at such locales, loaded them up with stacks of albums, and shared with festivalgoers their deep love for the old-time, folk, and bluegrass music recorded on the piled-up vinyl. When a young Jim Lauderdale approached them in the summer of 1973, he thanked them for the albums they’d sold him the previous year and asked for more. Irwin and Leighton sold him two more albums, one of them by Appalachian banjo master Don Stover, Things in Life, from their own label, Rounder Records, which they had started three years earlier with their friend Bill Nowlin.

Drawing deeply on rich archives as well as extensive interviews with artists, Rounder staff, and Rounder founders Irwin, Leighton (later Leighton Levy), and Nowlin, music journalist David Menconi tells a riveting tale of the birth and growth of an indie record label that shaped the landscape of American music. They did it by always putting the music first and letting the business follow, and Menconi charts that path in Oh, Didn’t They Ramble: Rounder Records and the Transformation of American Roots Music.

Irwin and Nowlin were roommates at Tufts University in the mid-1960s and bonded over their love of music of all kinds. In April 1967, the two hitchhiked down to Union Grove, North Carolina, to hang out at the annual Old Time Fiddler’s Convention, where folk music emerged as their primary love.

“For me, seeing that music in its natural environment with people jamming here and there, the dancing, all the joy — it was unlike anything I’d ever experienced, any music I’d ever seen before,” Irwin says in the book. “It was so embedded and important to the culture. There was no turning back after that.”

Irwin met Leighton in a coffee shop later that summer. Eventually, the three founded Rounder Records in their apartment in Sommerville, Massachusetts, in 1970, and over 40 years — Rounder was sold to Concord Records in 2010 — they released close to 4,000 albums, an average, according to Menconi, of “more than one per week … when most independent labels were doing well if they managed one release a month.”

The source of the label’s name is now lost to history and faulty memories, though some speculate it is a reference to the Holy Modal Rounders or to the round outline of albums. According to Menconi, “Rounder was a word with definite connotations in folk music. In the parlance of old-time music legends and tall tales, a rounder was a well-oiled traveler who made the rounds, almost universally a male, ne’er-do-well drifter with a drinking problem. Closely related to rounder was the word rambler, which you might call a rounder who roved particularly far and wide without ever settling down.”

Many of Rounder’s albums left an enduring imprint on roots music, none more than the album known to many simply by its release number, Rounder 0044, the self-titled album by J.D. Crowe & the New South, whose lineup was Crowe on banjo, Tony Rice on guitar, Ricky Skaggs on fiddle and mandolin, Jerry Douglas on dobro, and Bobby Slone on bass.

“For Rounder as well as acoustic music in general,” writes Menconi, “0044 would be as much of a milestone as Norman Blake’s Back Home in Sulphur Springs [Rounder 0012] had been three years earlier — another consensus signpost.”

The album set “a new course for bluegrass, and it also made Crowe’s and Rice’s reputations. It’s probably the single biggest reason that both made it into International Bluegrass Music Association’s Hall of Fame (in 2003 and 2013, respectively). Hugh Sturgill [the band’s manager], however, singles out Ricky Skaggs’ studio and arrangement genius as the most important element.”

In July 1977, the founders followed their passion and released an album whose music resembled none on the label to date. Rounder released George Thorogood and the Destroyers (Rounder 3013) in the same year it released the self-titled debut of Skaggs’ new band, Boone Creek (Rounder 0081), among others. “By all rights, the most predictable outcome for all this would have been for George Thorogood and the Destroyers to sink like a stone as an anomalous, quickly forgotten curiosity,” Menconi writes. But by spring of 1978 it had sold more than 40,000 copies.

In 1987, Rounder released Too Late to Cry (Rounder 0235), the debut album from a 16-year-old fiddle player and singer named Alison Krauss. “The album was more than solid, showing Krauss as a raw but promising talent who still sometimes overplayed,” Menconi writes. “Lots of room to grow, though, and sales were solid.” Krauss’ career continued to flourish, and her albums would eventually sell in the millions and win Grammy Awards. When Krauss delivered remarks in 2016 inducting Rounder founders Irwin, Leighton Levy, and Nowlin into the IBMA Hall of Fame, she summed up the Rounder way: “It means authenticity. And it means dedication to soulful true music. Just as people are called to spread the gospel, the Rounders have been called to spread the message of our beloved music. … They ended up creating the most successful independent record label in the entire world.”

According to Menconi, “Rounder began in the humblest of circumstances, a partnership collectively owned and operated by the three founders. The original impetus was simple: There were records they thought should exist, but nobody else was putting them out. So they decided to do it themselves. … Rounder left a profoundly important mark on the landscape of American music, because its founders had a larger vision also encompassing politics, culture, and lifestyle as well as music. … And because Rounder put out so much music with only one real criterion — ‘Do we like this?’ — Rounder didn’t simply keep vintage musical traditions alive but helped broaden and define them.”

Thank goodness Irwin, Leighton Levy, and Nowlin rambled like they did. Their curiosity, instinct, and passion, and their willingness to release a broad range of music, shaped the music we today call Americana in such an off-hand way. Rounder’s genius was to give J.D. Crowe & the New South, George Thorogood, Norman Blake, Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard, Robert Plant, and Alison Krauss, among many others, rooms in the same big house, whose walls were permeable. And thank goodness Menconi wrote this history of the label. By telling the stories of the founders, Oh, Didn’t They Ramble: Rounder Records and the Transformation of American Roots Music captures vividly their fervent devotion to this music, as well as their commitment to sharing it with the world. Menconi’s inspiring book makes a good companion to Nowlin’s own memoir, Vinyl Ventures: My Fifty Years at Rounder Records.

David Menconi’s Oh, Didn’t They Ramble: Rounder Records and the Transformation of American Roots Music was published Oct. 17 by The University of North Carolina Press.