David Menconi Takes Us Inside Rounder Records with Oh, Didn’t They Ramble 

David Menconi’s latest book, Oh, Didn’t They Ramble: Rounder Records and the Transformation of American Roots Music (University of North Carolina Press), examines the critical role that Rounder Records played in the evolution of roots music.

Menconi tells the story of the label’s founders, Ken Irwin, Marian Leighton Levy, and Bill Nowlin and their unwavering passion for records that respected tradition while almost always breaking new artistic ground. 

The author is flawless in his approach, creating a narrative that is both thorough and succinct. Irwin, Leighton Levy and Nowlin emerge not only as remarkable people who found their mission early and their individual roles almost by accident. The narrative unfolds in such a way that the reader understands how carefully the founders understood the intersections of art, commerce, and passion. 

Menconi recalls that the project began after the founders donated their archive to the University of North Carolina’s Folklife Collection, allowing him access to important documents that helped tell the story. Additionally, he interviewed the founders, label employees and artists who recorded for the label. 

Those who have read his previous book, Step It Up and Go, a history of North Carolina music, will recognize his own passion for the subjects he takes on and the manner in which he places the reader inside the story such that they can, at least for a moment, inhabit the same world as the figures he writes about. (The forward by Robert Plant is succinct but accurate in its approach, reminding us of his deep passion for American roots music.) 

Speaking from his home in North Carolina, Menconi discussed some of the highlights of the book and even an unlikely turn or two in the story. 

 

A deeply interesting part of the Rounder story is that the three principals are there from the beginning up until the sale. That’s unusual, right? 

Well, not quite so much with indie labels. Major labels, yes. My God, it’s unheard of in this day and age for anyone to last [at one of those] for anything more than a couple of years it seems like. In fact, Rounder has gone through a couple of presidents in the years since the founders sold the company. For them to be in place for 40-plus years, running this company, is pretty unusual. 

 

I think it comes across in the pages that that’s attributable to close friendships and a shared vision that really doesn’t waver. They all found their roles pretty quickly, carried them out, and they respected each other. 

Very much. They really were the ideal combination. Despite none of them having anything like a business background, one of them, Bill, had a real head for it. He kept the trains running on time very well and kept the bills paid. Marian was the spokesperson and public face of the company. Ken was the guy who was in the studio all the time. There was a lot of crossover there, obviously, but that’s generally how it broke down and they came to realize, pretty early on, that this could work, if they just let everybody do what they were passionate about. 

 

 

Early on, they were doing some weird records, like Hollerin’, which is a record of field hollers. What’s the moment that allows them to really flourish? Is it George Thorogood or is it some of the smaller bluegrass records? 

Those early bluegrass records, even though they didn’t sell nearly as well as George Thorogood, were important in [the label] setting their boundaries, creating their space. Norman Blake took a big step up in 1972 that elevated their profile and [gave them] their most successful record to that point. It was just the right size hit for them to get some traction and progress without putting them out of business because frequently that’s what would happen. A couple of years later, J.D. Crowe & The New South [was] kind of a new thing in bluegrass. That really set the table for what came to be known as jamgrass as it evolved through the ‘70s and into the ‘80s. 

Then George Thorogood came along and blew it up to whole other level. They went from some records selling five figures to a gold record, which is kind of unheard of for a label like that. Again, it happened at just the right speed for them to take advantage of without being overwhelmed. The fact that they were a distributor handling all these other labels, gave them leverage to get paid, which is also important. You’re having to spend all of this money with making records and shipping them. It can take you months or even years to get paid. But if these outlets are counting on your for other product, you can get your money a whole lot quicker. 

 

Speaking of money, there is a quote in the book from Thorogood about that. 

[Laughs.] 

 

He says that but he also seems to have a fairly good relationship with the Rounder folks to this day. 

Oh yes. He did get paid. He was kidding, but, yeah, artists always feel like the accounting is never in their favor. More often than not, they’re right about that. But, yes, he is still very fond of them and he was a delightful character. A real fun guy to interview. When you ask him, “How are you?” He’s still telling the joke, “Bad!” 

 

[Laughs.] 

OK, Dad. There are some artists who aren’t crazy [about the label] or who feel that they were ill-used. But the vast majority have good feelings about Rounder and have good things to say. 

 

VIDEO: George Thorogood and the Destroyers “Bad to the Bone”

It’s funny to me that he was this artist that no one seemed to want to touch. Rounder even seemed to take this attitude of, “OK. We’ll kind of tolerate you. We’ll placate you.” But the label and the band became the magic combination. 

That was probably my favorite chapter to work on, just because it was just a funny, weird, unusual, and unexpected story. You go back to 1976 and nobody involved with this thought, “Wow, this is going to be the record that puts us on the map!” It was just so different from what they’d been doing and so out of character that they thought it was going to confuse people but why not? This very unlikely underdog story. A couple of stations started to play the record late at night and it snowballed from there. The next thing you know, a couple of years later, he’s opening for the Stones at the Superdome. How can you not love a story like that? 

 

Alison Krauss is also another remarkable story. She’s an accidental discovery and she goes on to become the flagship artist of Rounder in some ways. 

The Alison Krauss discovery story is one of the most adorable things I’ve ever heard. The image of Ken sitting out with a glass of lemonade on his back deck with a stack of tapes and writing rejection letters. Here’s this a tape where this girl, and she was a girl, age 14, was singing on track four and that was enough to hook him. That’s some ears, man. Whatever one thinks about Ken Irwin, his A&R instincts are 100 percent dead-on. 

It took some doing in those pre-Internet days, this was the mid-80s, for him to find her but then when he did, she was just so excited. There again, fortune smiled on Rounder in terms of the timeline. She didn’t blow up right away. Her first album did about 7500 copies. That’s real good numbers for bluegrass. Everybody’s going to be happy with that. But it just grew and grew until, five years later, she’s doing almost triple platinum. It’s remarkable, the run she went on to have. 

She was smart enough to realize that she was in the perfect place. Rounder was going to let her do what she wanted. Not meddle. Major labels came around, waving lots of money and they could have given her more money than what she was making, but she was making more than enough to live comfortably. Loyalty was and is important to her. She’s played with the same core of musicians pretty much her whole career. She stayed put for a really long time. 

As I was reading the book, I started to have a faint recollection and started saying, “Wasn’t Rush on Rounder?” The impulse wasn’t strong enough that I actually got up and looked at my record collection. 

[Laughs.] 

 

And that’s an interesting story because they, too, were grassroots. It was a fitting home for them late in their career. 

Rounder has attracted bands that have the kind of fanbase that you need to manage. You take care of your fans, they’ll take care of you. Rush has always been good about that. They’re not my ball of wax but it’s really hard not to respect what they’ve done. 

About halfway through the founders’ tenure, they hired a president and actually made him their boss. John Virant, the fourth Rounder. As part of that they gave him his own imprint, he could put anything he wanted on there and that’s why you started seeing things like They Might Be Giants and Marky Ramone on Zoë/Rounder. 

He was a huge fan. He grew up an alienated teenager in the Midwest and Rush really spoke to him. So he pulled some strings to meet with them. One of their crew was a big reggae fan and Rounder had an imprint, Heartbeat Records, that did reggae, so that was his foot in the door. He schmoozed and lobbied and begged and pleaded for years and they signed to Rounder to do some video releases. They did some live albums and DVDs for various tours and they were very successful. So, yeah, Rush on Rounder. It’s just bizarre. Even more than Robert Plant on Rounder. 

 

You mention in the book that Raising Sand, the first record he did with Alison Krauss, had it emerged just a few years earlier, it would have been even bigger. 

Yeah. How many times did we see the Grammys just blow something up? Norah Jones, Bonnie Raitt, even Graceland, sold, I think, most of its copies after it won all of those Grammy awards. That just doesn’t happen anymore. Unfortunately.