Donald Teplyske | May 1, 2021
Vinyl Ventures: My Fifty Years at Rounder Records
by Bill Nowlin Equinoxpub.com 2020
Imagine starting a record company in 2021with next to no business experience nor a background, beyond listening, in music. Oh, and launch that label with an album from an obscure North Carolinian banjo player. A daunting, even foolish proposition?
I m not sure it was different in 197O when three just-out-of-college friends, leftovers from the first generation of hippies and counter-culture types, decided to launch Rounder Records, a label that became synonymous with traditional and contemporary roots music over the next half-century. Vinyl Ventures: My Fifty Years at Rounder Records isn t likely to appeal to the masses. While he has an engaging, personable, and readable writing style, Bill Nowlin one of those three original Rounder founders tends to occasionally get bogged down in the minutiae of ledger sheets (which, for this reader, undoubtedly provi