After 40 Years, Record Label Has Deep Roots in American Music

18 April 2010

BARBARA KLEIN:

Welcome to THIS IS AMERICA in VOA Special English. I’m Barbara Klein. Rounder Records is an independent music company celebrating its fortieth anniversary. Rounder is a major label that specializes in roots music, including bluegrass and old-time country. This week on our program, we look at Rounder's history and listen to some of its artists.

(MUSIC: ALISON KRAUSS and ROBERT PLANT - "Rich Woman")

That was Alison Krauss and Robert Plant with "Rich Woman." That song received one of the more than fifty Grammy Awards that have gone to Rounder recordings.

Two men and a woman started the company in nineteen seventy. Ken Irwin, Bill Nowlin and Marian Leighton Levy were friends. They knew each other from their college days in the Boston, Massachusetts, area in the nineteen sixties. They were not musicians, but they had seen people whose music they thought should be documented.

A few months ago, Ken Irwin and Marian Leighton Levy spoke on Tuned In Broadcasting's "Music Business Radio" program from Nashville.

Ken Irwin told how he got the idea to start a record company after meeting someone else who wanted to do the same. But he says he and his two friends didn't really know much about the music business.

KEN IRWIN: "So when this thought came about starting a record label we already had a few ideas of people that we'd like to record. But even after that, even after our first two records which came out in nineteen seventy, our only initial goal was to make one record which we thought would be a classic in a field. So if you thought about fiddle records, we would have one of the great fiddle records that would make it into the top ten or top banjo record. But we certainly didn't have goals. I don't know if we had ever heard of Grammys at that point. Or if we had they certainly wouldn't have entered our consciousness."