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Equinox Publishing has announced a March 30 release for Vinyl Ventures – My Fifty Years at Rounder Records by Bill Nowlin.

Nowlin was one of three recent college graduates who founded the Rounder Records label in 1970 in Boston, MA, alongside Ken Irwin and Marian Leighton Levy. These three have shared in the past that they were greener than green, knowing very little about the business they were entering, using their love of traditional American music forms as their guiding passion. Of course since that humble beginning, the company has gone on to become a premier source for bluegrass, old time, and Americana music, with more than 3,000 releases in total.

Home to such iconic artists as Alison Krauss, Béla Fleck, Norman Blake, and Tony Rice, the label was sold to the Concord Music Group in 2010, with the company subsequently moving its headquarters to Nashville. While Irwin and Leighton Levy remained involved in some creative aspects of the business, Nowlin began to focus on his new interest, writing and editing books about another piece of Americana… baseball. He continues to manage the Rounder Records Trust, and participates in the bluegrass world in other ways.

But with Vinyl Ventures, Bill returns to the early days of Rounder to tell the story of how three college friends formed a record label that came to produce some of the most historic bluegrass albums of the 20th century. Early records tended to be with New England artists, including projects with Tony Trischka, but the release in 1975 of J.D. Crowe & The New South’s self-titled LP – the epochal 0044 album – Rounder was on the map in a big way.

These early times are a primary focus of the book, which also covers its entire run as a major indie label right up to the time it was sold. Fans of the music the label produced – including artists like Rhonda Vincent, Sam Bush, IIIrd Tyme Out, Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver, Dailey & Vincent, and Dan Tyminski – should enjoy reading about the business side of Rounder, and the growing pains the company experienced at least twice during their time. The explosion in sales of records for Alison Krauss, and blues rocker George Thorogood, tested the growing label’s cash flow, and forced them to into new business strategies in order both to survive, and to continue servicing their artists with the personal touch they had come to expect.

The book also includes more than 50 color photos that Nowlin took of recording sessions and artists, as well as some from Rounder’s deep archive stretching back 50 years.

Keep an eye out for Vinyl Ventures when it releases at the end of March.

How to get a head ache in just 10 minutes. “It doesn’t take that long!”, Bill Nowlin, the author of The Rounder Book of Bluegrass Music Trivia might well respond.

The recently published Rounder Book of Bluegrass Music Trivia examines bluegrass music history both recent and early and “examines” is the operative word, as Nowlin tests our knowledge of the music with a sequence of 272 questions.

Nowlin does this in different ways, and with a degree of humor in some instances; some have a multiple choice, some present a true or false option, others are just a simple one-line query. There’s a deliberate sequencing here and there, so that if you manage to answer one, a similar question follows and there’s yet more head-scratching! Nowlin, who has written several books about his beloved Boston Red Sox baseball team – that isn’t any reason for a self-assured bluegrass fan to not check how little they know about bluegrass music, for that is the net result of working through just a selection questions. Of course, if you have lived it all then the questions are simple, right?

Nowlin tells us a little bit of the background to his book and in so doing reminds readers of Bluegrass Unlimited that some his questions have appeared as the Bits and Pieces column in that venerable magazine ……..

“I started with the idea of a book [around 2012], which I figured I might self-publish. I asked BU if they wanted to go in on it with me, and promote it with ads in the magazine and we’d split the proceeds in some fashion. That idea didn’t fly. But they did offer to run a column. The first one ran in June 2013, and basically ran for about 27 months (I don’t recall when the last one was.) It was almost 2 ½ years but not quite.

Basically, what happened was that when I hit about 250 items, I was getting a little burnt out. I guess they figured it had more or less run its course, too.

That was the period of time I worked on it. I had about 35 or 40 to start with, then I just kept coming up with more for the monthly column. And adding a few here and there.”

Although Rounder are the publishers and their name appears in the title, the content is far from being exclusively devoted to Rounder-related topics.

There are some illustrations scattered through the book although reproduction as black-and-white photographs means there is a lack of contrast to many.

Thankfully, the answers are not in micro-lettering placed upside down at the bottom of each page; they’re provided at the back of the book and, in his own inimitable style, Nowlin provides far more than a one-word or one-sentence answer, including lot of interesting detail, and occasionally, some context, perhaps betraying the thinking behind the question.

The Rounder Book of Bluegrass Music Trivia will make a great Christmas gift. Get your copy now and spread the cost.

So, my question to you is; what’s at 5400 Carolina Place, Springfield, Virginia? Stumped?

Rounder Books, 2016
190 pages
ISBN-10: 1579402518
ISBN-13: 978-1579402518

Tag: Bill Nowlin

Vinyl Ventures – the story of Rounder Records as told by Bill Nowlin

The Rounder Book of Bluegrass Music Trivia