How Rounder Records went from minor to major

Started by three students with $125, the record label is still quirkily independent, despite being home to huge talent

By Tim Cooper

In 1970, with the likes of Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath topping the charts, three American friends embarked on a very different musical mission. Inspired by radical campus politics and the folk revival, the university students Ken Irwin, Bill Nowlin and Marian Leighton formed their own record label in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Their aim? To preserve their country’s musical heritage. “None of us was in it for the money,” says Irwin, who still runs Rounder Records with his two original partners. “We were basically just music fans,” Nowlin adds. “It was a hobby,” Leighton sums up.
Clubbing together $125, they pressed just 500 albums by their first two signings — one a long-forgotten banjo player called George Pegram, the other a new group of students, the Spark Gap Wonder Boys, who played “old-time” music and, curiously, included the son of Alistair “Letter from America” Cooke. “We didn’t know anything about the record business, so we made it up as we went along,” says Nowlin, who persuaded a local shop, Discount Records, to sell five copies of each album, and set up stalls at local bluegrass concerts to shift the rest. “We had a one-page contract, and somehow we knew that 25 cents an album was the standard royalty rate. We paid 50 cents because we didn’t want to be accused of being rapacious record-company owners. Read more.