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Vinyl Ventures: My Fifty Years at Rounder Records by Bill Nowlin (review)

2024; Music Library Association; Volume: 80; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/not.2024.a919055

1534-150X

Marci Cohen,

Copyright and Intellectual Property

Reviewed by: Vinyl Ventures: My Fifty Years at Rounder Records by Bill Nowlin Marci Cohen Vinyl Ventures: My Fifty Years at Rounder Records. By Bill Nowlin. Bristol, CT: Equinox Publishing, 2021. [xii, 320 p. ISBN 9781800500068 (paperback), $29.95.] Illustrations, endnotes, indexes. "America's most prominent independent roots-oriented label" is how the New York Times described Rounder Records as the label celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in 2000 (p. 236). Label cofounder Bill Nowlin tells the [End Page 541] story in Vinyl Ventures: My Fifty Years at Rounder Records. Nowlin, Ken Irwin, and Marian Leighton Levy essentially stumbled into starting the label in 1970 to fill a void in the marketplace for the music they wanted to hear. Prioritizing the music and musicians over profits and focusing on both traditional and contemporary roots music from around the world, they slowly built a successful enterprise and created a template for how to run an independent label. Nowlin recounts their strides and stumbles in great detail. Setting the stage, Nowlin describes meeting Irwin in 1962 at Tufts University, bonding with him over folk music. The undergraduates talked their way into gigs around Boston and Cambridge and hitchhiked to New York to buy Folkways LPs on sale and go to folk shows. Irwin met Leighton Levy during their college years, and they also shared musical tastes. In the wake of the British Invasion, the folk revival died, and the three friends lamented that record companies had stopped releasing new albums by their beloved folk artists. They hadn't intended to be a business: "It was just something we did" (p. 25). Starting out, they did not know the word "invoice," did not pay taxes out of ignorance, and skirted zoning restrictions on commercial and residential spaces. They also fell into distributing other labels. With a focus on folk and bluegrass, both contemporary and traditional, Rounder was initially run as a collective with no specific job titles. The owners all had day jobs. They plowed the profits back into the label, not drawing salaries, a practice to which they would return for a stretch in the late 1980s to support growth. In Rounder's early years, the three founders traveled up and down the Eastern Seaboard, to the Mississippi Delta and Chicago for recording sessions, often in roughshod conditions. They hit the festival circuit, selling records out of a VW bus that they also slept in and finding every other way to limit their expenses. They generated goodwill as others recognized that they were helping preserve the country's musical traditions. Their artist-friendly contract terms were in some ways deliberate and in other ways the product of obliviousness to industry standards. Music librarians will delight in reading about their work at the Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress (pp. 48–50), as well as their label's long-term commitment to extensive liner notes. Rounder built up their catalog with both new recordings and pressing up existing tracks, and they dove into music from the rest of the world, caring more about whether it should be heard than whether it would sell well. Nowlin devotes considerable space to Rounder's two most popular artists, George Thorogood & the Delaware Destroyers and Alison Krauss. With both stories, he demonstrates the label's ethos and methods. Their reservations about Thorogood sounding too commercial for their aesthetic were offset by liking the band members as people and Thorogood's commitment to traditional blues. The label slowly cultivated them into a word-of-mouth sensation. Rounder recognized when the band was outgrowing Rounder's resources and worked with them on finding a major-label deal that would benefit everyone. Later, they signed Krauss in 1986 as a teenage bluegrass violin prodigy. She developed artistically and commercially, going platinum with Now That I Found You in 1995, and going on to earn twenty-seven Grammy Awards, including wins in 2009 for Album of the Year (Raising Sand) and Record of the Year ("Please Read the Letter") in collaboration with Robert Plant. With more pride than bitterness, Nowlin points out that artists who jumped to major labels did not necessarily see [End Page 542] bigger sales, and...