Vinyl Ventures: My FIfty Years at Rounder Records

[...]the company's founders were instrumental in setting up the Americana Music Association. Over its 50-year history, the label produced several ground-breaking, historically important reissue series, including complete runs of the original recordings by Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family, significant releases by pre-war iconoclasts, such as Blind Alfred Reed, Fiddlin' John Carson, and Gid Tanner and his Skillet Lickers, and important multiple disc sets of recordings from the collection of the Library of Congress by pivotal "folk" musicians such as Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie as well as early jazz great Jelly Roll Morton. Nowlins book attempts to tell the long and incredibly complicated tale of the labels releases, business practices, their struggles with the idea of being a collective while eventually employing over one hundred individuals, and the companys survival over a half century in an industry that saw the advent of the CD, the rise of the music video, digital piracy, the death of retail record/CD stores and the current world where streaming is king.