But as a blues fan with a deep reverence for his heroes, he’d have appreciated becoming latter-day labelmates with musicians such as Johnny Shines and Robert Lockwood Jr, and working with a company whose dedication to documenting America’s musical roots has led to it being dubbed the Smithsonian of the music industry.
Rounder reaches its 40th anniversary this year, and a special Celtic Connections concert is part of the celebrations. It may have grown into a business with publishing and merchandise divisions, as well as a catalogue of more than 3000 albums, but the label’s founders, who are still hands-on with the company, have never lost their enthusiasm. They went into the music business as complete novices, and still speak with considerable pride of early releases that cost a few hundred dollars to record, press up and print, and which were then distributed from the back of their cars.
“The reason we got into this was that we were music enthusiasts, although we also liked the idea of being folklorists preserving this great music on records,” says Marian Leighton Levy, one of the three original partners.
“To say that we knew nothing about what we were getting into would be an understatement, but there was a real gap in the music business back then. The musicians who had come up with the folk revival -- Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and others -- had moved on. But there were still musicians playing the real roots of the music -- blues, bluegrass, old-time fiddle players -- who were being neglected.”
Rounder’s first release, featuring a 76-year-old banjo player, George Pegram, came from a tape that already existed, which they secured for just $250. Friends who were graphic designers and were prepared to work for almost nothing added artwork, and the three founders, who lived communally and on means that would remain modest for some time to come, set out to sell enough copies to cover their costs and maybe help towards another album.
“There was no shortage of people to record,” says Levy. “Word soon got around musicians about what we were doing, and I think the second album cost even less than the first.
“The big distributors weren’t really interested in us but we found pockets of interest, like shops in areas where there were colleges.
And in the summer we’d go round bluegrass, folk and blues festivals with cartons of albums and take mail orders.
“Eventually we set up our own distribution company and were US agents for British folk labels like Topic -- and we were ahead of the pack by selling Cape Breton music.”
Business at Rounder remained largely under the mainstream music radar, although releases by Norman Blake and J D Crowe And The New South (featuring Keith Whitley and Ricky Skaggs) established them in the country market. Then a semi-professional baseball player, George Thorogood, arrived with a raucous take on Chicago blues and gave the label its first gold disc in 1978.
“That was unprecedented at the time,” says Levy. “Labels like ours didn’t approach sales figures like that (500,000). So it was a surprise for us too -- but it got us noticed.”
Nanci Griffith, banjo wizard Bela Fleck, Joe Ely and Alison Krauss, who came to Rounder’s attention when she was only 13, followed Thorogood on to the label. Releases including the legendary Alan Lomax’s priceless recordings of Scottish tradition-bearers Jeannie Robertson, Jimmy MacBeath and Davie Stewart kept up the founders’ folklorist ideals -- and this, of course, adds to Levy’s pleasure at being involved in Celtic Connections. The stars of the 40th-birthday concert -- bluegrass whirlwind Blue Highway, country-music veteran James Hand, Louisiana-born singer-songwriter Alecia Nugent and Canadian folk-rocker Sarah Harmer -- all continue the Rounder tradition of music that is rooted in sincerity and integrity.
As the big music companies wrestle with falling CD sales in the face of music downloads, both legal and illegal, Levy gives a sober assessment of the current state of a business she joined when vinyl was the medium and the now-almost-forgotten cassette tape had yet to gain a toehold in the US market.
“There’s certainly a problem for CD sales in the lack of retail outlets, which are disappearing fast,” she says. “But we do very well with the online retailer Amazon, which is our biggest customer, and we see downloads as being as much to do with promotion as sales. It’s like reading books online. I do it, but I still buy the books that I want to keep. And I think music fans are the same: they’ll download a track for instant consumption but they still want the artefact they can hold in their hands.”
Rounder Records’ 40th birthday concert is at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall tonight as part of Celtic Connections.
