The Rounder Records Story: The 2000s By Geoffrey Himes

If pop music is for the young, roots music is for adults. Pop music is about your first love, roots music about your umpteenth love. Pop music is about dating, roots music about marriage. Pop music is about vacation, roots music about work. Pop music is about peers, roots music about families. Pop music is about novelty, roots music about tradition. This doesn’t imply that roots music is in some way superior; the young deserve to have their lives illuminated in song as much as any other generation. But adults have just as much right.

When pop musicians, even those who have enjoyed tremendous success, reach their 40s, it’s only natural that they will want to make music about their own stage of life; it’s only natural that they will turn to roots music. They always act surprised when their adult music doesn’t sell as well as their earlier music, but that’s inevitable too, for record buyers skew young. When their pop-oriented major labels inevitably cut them loose, those artists have no choice but to turn to a roots label. And the roots label with the best track record at marketing and creative support was Rounder. Just consider this list of artists who recorded for Rounder in the 2000s: Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant; the Beatles’ Paul McCartney; the Cranberries’ Dolores O’Riordan; Heart’s Ann Wilson; fusion star Bela Fleck; Hollywood film stars Steve Martin, Minnie Driver, and Kevin Bacon; Canadian rock bands Rush and Cowboy Junkies; American folk-rock legends Nanci Griffith and Laura Nyro; British folk-rock legends Fairport Convention and Linda Thompson; pop hit-makers like Boz Scaggs; and country chart-toppers Willie Nelson, Ricky Skaggs, Joe Diffie, and Mary Chapin Carpenter.

Few pop stars have enjoyed more success than Plant, but after Led Zeppelin broke up, he was free to pursue his love of American roots music. At first he concentrated on the blues side of things, but when the 2000 soundtrack for O Brother, Where Art Thou? came out, Plant and eight million fellow record buyers fell in love with the album’s old-time songs, especially the contributions from current and past Rounder artists such as John Hartford, the Nashville Bluegrass Band, the Cox Family, Norman Blake, and the members of Union Station: Alison Krauss, Dan Tyminski, Barry Bales, Ron Block, and Jerry Douglas. Plant decided he wanted to explore that music with Krauss, with the soundtrack’s producer T-Bone Burnett, and with Rounder Records. “There’s a kind of English person who knows way more about American music than most Americans do,” Burnett pointed out. “Elvis Costello is like that, and so is Robert. But he had never gotten into this part of it-the Dock Boggs and mountain stuff-and now he’s chasing that down.” Krauss’s motivation was obvious to anyone who remembered that she covered Bad Company’s “Oh Atlanta” on her breakthrough album, Now That I’ve Found You, or heard her talk excitedly about meeting Foreigner’s Lou Gramm in an airport. For all her commitment to bluegrass, she had a weak spot for British hard-rock bands.

The result was Raising Sand, credited to Robert Plant/Alison Krauss. “The connection between them is they can both create these different tones that are mystical,” Burnett added. “She’s probably the best singer in the world right now. She can stand up in front of any number of people, sing a cappella and make them cry. Robert’s also one of the great singers in the world, but working with him I got to see the artist part-the willingness to follow his vision wherever it goes.” You can hear that connection on a song like “Please Read the Letter,” which originally appeared on a 1998 album credited to Plant and his Led Zep partner Jimmy Page. The song begins with a slow and spare reading of the country-blues lyrics about the note left behind by a departing spouse but then builds momentum and intensity as if jumping from the 19th century to the 21st. That kind of time-jumping occurs throughout the record, thanks to songs such as Woodstock Mountains’ “Killing the Blues,” Townes Van Zandt’s “Nothin’,” the Everly Brothers’ “Gone Gone Gone” and Doc Watson’s “Your Long Journey,” and to picking by such current or former Rounder artists as Norman Blake, Mike Seeger, and the Nashville Bluegrass Band’s Dennis Crouch. The album hit #2 on three different charts: Billboard pop, Billboard country and British pop. It was certified platinum and on February 8, 2009, the album won all five Grammy Awards for which it was nominated, including Album of the Year and Record of the Year (for “Please Read the Letter”). These are the two biggest prizes in American music, honors that every label in every genre competes for. For Rounder Records to walk away with both statuettes was the ultimate triumph for an independent roots label.

Steve Martin was as unlikely a Rounder artist as Plant, but the comedian too was drawn back to American roots music as he grew older. His connection was Tony Trischka, who had first recorded for the label as part of the band Country Cooking in 1971, who had introduced Bela Fleck to the label in 1976, who had written the liner notes for Krauss’s debut album in 1987, and who had released 10 albums under his own name for Rounder. Back in 1974, Trischka was touring the East Coast with the band Breakfast Special and at a Greenwich Village club the opening act was Martin. “Even when Steve was just starting out,” Trischka recalls, “he was already hilarious. He had the arrow through the head, the banjo and a lot of the material that became famous later. He was also a pretty good straight-ahead bluegrass player.” The two five-string pickers bonded and reunited many years later to collaborate on two tracks-the old bluegrass standard “Plunkin’ Rag” and Martin’s composition “The Crow”-for Trischka’s 2007 Rounder album, Double Banjo Bluegrass Spectacular. The experience went so well-Trischka, Martin, and Fleck even performed together on The David Letterman Show - that Martin chose Rounder to release his first album devoted to music rather than comedy. The title track from that album, The Crow, reunited Martin and Trischka, who says, “The tune he wrote for the new album isn’t hard to play, but there’s something about it that’s quite captivating.” It was so captivating that it helped win the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album.

Irma Thomas was also able to age gracefully at Rounder. She had scored her first R&B hit as a 19-year-old singer from New Orleans in 1960, and she finally earned her first Grammy (for Best Contemporary Blues Album) 46 years later for After the Rain. Thomas and producer Scott Billington had picked the album’s songs before New Orleans’ levees buckled beneath Hurricane Katrina. But after the storm, when Thomas returned to a home soaked in flood waters and a neighborhood emptied of neighbors, songs such as Arthur Alexander’s “In the Middle of It All,” Mississippi John Hurt’s “Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor,” Stevie Wonder’s “Shelter in the Rain,” David Egan’s “If You Knew How Much,” and Doc Pomus’s “I Count the Tears” acquired an extra resonance. Thomas had never sung with such intensity, and her commitment was matched by her pan-Louisiana band: Cajun guitarist Dirk Powell, blues guitarist Sonny Landreth, Galactic drummer Stanton Moore, and New Orleans jazzers David Torkanowsky and James Singleton.

Mary Chapin Carpenter finally signed with Rounder in 2007 after coming oh-so-close to signing 21 years earlier. Rounder’s early-detection radar had picked up reports in 1986 that a gifted but unknown young singer-songwriter was working in the coffeehouses around D.C. The label tracked her down and offered her a recording contract. Only a few last details remained to be worked out before she signed, but then a Nashville executive on holiday heard Carpenter as an opening act and made her an offer she couldn’t refuse: a deal with Columbia Records. It paid off for her; she won five Grammys and scored twenty top-25 singles on the country charts, including a Cajun dance number “Down at the Twist and Shout,” recorded with BeauSoleil, and a version of Lucinda Williams’ “Passionate Kisses.” Carpenter’s own compositions were recorded by Joan Baez, Tony Rice, Cyndi Lauper, and Wynonna Judd. The last of those hits came in 1997, however, and Columbia no longer knew what to do with her. Rounder was the perfect home for her newer, more mature songs that examined the challenge of continuing commitment and determination in the face of so many disappointments. Without minimizing the obstacles, she still found grounds for optimism on tracks such as “I Have a Need for Solitude.” “She wanted to make quality records and not play the game anymore,” Ken Irwin says. “For us, she’s a quality writer and singer and we have a lot in common politically. It felt like a really good fit.”