Reflections on Rounder Records, the IBMA and Music Journalism With David Menconi

The celebrated NC author on the history of an essential roots music label, the near death experience of the music business, and the state of bluegrass today

Hello music friends! Spring has begun with a cruel note in our region, as wildfires have ripped through thousands of acres of western NC and upstate SC in recent weeks. There are a lot of people I know who have been directly affected, although thankfully I know of no one who has lost homes or loved ones. As I write this, beautiful cumulous clouds are forming in the skies here, bringing hope for much needed rain and relief from the intense, long-lasting winds and dry weather which have, in combination with the millions of fallen trees from Hurricane Helene, made these fires practically unstoppable. Now, two of those three factors look to be put in check, at least for a time.

Spring has brought more than heartache and anxiety, thankfully, in its usual bounty of live music popping up everywhere on the calendar. Soon, I will travel to Elkin, NC for the live taping of The Martha Bassett Show for its 100th episode. WNCW very recently began broadcasting this show, which originates from Winston-Salem public radio station WFDD. I will interview host Martha Bassett as well as some of her guests on that episode: Liz Longley, Hank Pattie & the Current, and Wayne Henderson. These conversations will become the foundation for a Southern Songs and Stories episode in the near future, adding to another recent conversation already in hand: John Cowan and Andrea Zonn, who are soon to release their new album from their band The HercuLeons.

Later this month, I take my annual sojourn to Wilkesboro for MerleFest, and in May, return to Albino Skunk Music Festival, both of which offer scores of music artists, professionals and folks behind the scenes who could wind up being the focus of future podcasts here. It is an exciting time of year to be anticipating all this music!

Onwards to the transcript of the latest podcast, which we hope you enjoy. Hear the whole thing, including the music, on any podcast app you choose, as we are freely available on all of them (and if you use one that does not show this series, please let me know and I will work to get set up there). Please take a moment to follow, give a top rating, and where you have the option, a written review of our work. It makes a big impact, and we appreciate it very much when you help us become more visible and gain more listeners through taking these simple and highly effective steps.

David Menconi

[Tony Rice “Monroe’s Hornpipe”, from The Bluegrass Album Band, volume 6, continuing as bed]

Have you heard of a guy named Lester Bangs? Highly recommended. How about Greil Marcus? Or Jessica Hopper? Maybe the names David Fricke, Bill C. Malone or Ann Powers ring a bell? I am a big fan of Craig Havighurst and Kim Ruehl, whom you may have come across, too. If any of these names are familiar, then my bet is that you are an avid reader of music journalism, music history, music criticism, music biographies, or maybe all of those categories of writing.

Even if you have never cracked open a book about music or delved deep into music reviews, or perhaps especially if so, our guest on this episode offers a lot to hold your attention. He was a staff writer at the Raleigh News & Observer for 28 years. He has also written for Rolling Stone, Billboard, Spin and New York Times. His latest book is titled Oh, Didn't They Ramble: Rounder Records and the Transformation of American Roots Music. David Menconi spoke with me in fall 2024 at the IBMA conference in his adopted hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina, in a conversation which touches on the remarkable story of Rounder Records, a music label whose story, as David put it, is the kismet story. A label formed by three idealistic folkies fresh out of college, it went on to champion the music of artists ranging from Alice Gerard to Alison Krauss, from the Blake Babies to Billy Strings, and from Ted Hawkins to Tony Rice, whose rendition of the Bill Monroe classic “Monroe’s Hornpipe” from The Bluegrass Album Band, volume 6 is playing now.

David talks about Rounder Records and a whole lot more, including the current state of the music industry, and the challenges faced by writers and musicians alike, as well as the significant history of bluegrass music in the city of Raleigh and the state of North Carolina. I am Joe Kendrick, welcoming you to our episode on David Menconi on Southern Songs and Stories.

[SSaS theme song with VO by Joe K]

It was a Tuesday afternoon late in September, towards the beginning of the International Bluegrass Music Association’s conference and World Of Bluegrass festival. Seeing that it has been six months since then as I say this, it would seem that I am pretty late in the game with this episode. It reminds me of the Chris Guillebeau quote: “The best time to start was last year. Failing that, today will do."

David’s interview came towards the end of a busy festival season, which found me, like many years, stockpiling many interviews as they came available, and putting them in the schedule for eventual release. That is the first reason why you are hearing this just now, but I have a feeling that there are other, much less straightforward and even somewhat mysterious reasons why this came together now. For example, I came upon a book by author and jazz musician Ted Gioia at the same time that I began going back over my interview with David Menconi, and was surprised to come back across David mentioning being an avid reader of Gioia’s work. Also, the spring issue of the music journal No Depression recently arrived, which included an article on the struggles of music artists to reach the middle class; this topic is also one David and I discuss here. These kinds of synchronicities make an impact on the finished work. It is impossible to guess exactly what effect they will have now versus how this episode would have turned out had it come out last year, but it gets me thinking about things like all the anecdotes of hit songs that were recorded as an afterthought, when there was some extra studio time left over. There are many, many examples of serendipity in the music world. Rounder Records was one of them. Maybe this podcast is having its moment right now, too. Kismet!

Our conversation begins with my question about the history of bluegrass music in Raleigh, which is not where he grew up, but has been David’s home for decades. Here is David Menconi:

00:04:23 David Menconi

I’m coming up on 34 years. So I'm about as close to a native as anybody gets anymore. Seems like. Raleigh's place in bluegrass history in North Carolina in Raleigh, specifically in North Carolina in general, has a bigger one than you think.

Most notably, Earl Scruggs. I mean, the music wasn't bluegrass until Earl Scruggs joined Bill Monroe's bluegrass boys in 1945 at the Ryman Auditorium. He's born and raised in North Carolina. Learned to play here. Learned his style by listening to what he heard on the radio around here.

And that's what really launched the music. I mentioned Bill Monroe. He and his brother Charlie were touring around the southeast, setting up shop at various radio stations, and they spent a good long while at WPTF here in Raleigh. And it had come to the -- you'd set up in a certain city and then play there for a while and kind of fish it out, as it were, and then move on to the next town. And at the end of that, Charlie Monroe told his younger brother Bill, “We're going to leave tomorrow at whatever time it was, and if you show up, then we're still a team and we'll go on to Chattanooga” or wherever it was they were going to go.

Funny if it would be Chattanooga, since IBMA is leaving for that, but I think actually it was Knoxville. Anyway, Bill did not show up, and that was the breakup of the Monroe brothers. And Bill went off on his own and started bluegrass, but you know, at the very end there Raleigh's where they were when they split up and then one of their big hits, they recorded over in Charlotte. “What Would you give for your soul?”

And yeah, there's plenty of excellent contemporary bluegrass bands that have come from here. Steep Canyon Rangers, Chatham County Line and of course, Tony Rice. Curly Seckler was another. So yeah, lots of the giants of the genre have come from here.

00:06:23 Joe Kendrick

David, you've covered music for decades, and you've written many books, so you're in the deep end of the pool musically. You know a few things! But this also this whole week of IBMA and World of bluegrass. You know, the whole culture of it. That it's about that musical connection, but it's about a lot of family kind of connections. A bunch of adoptive families. Sort of, you know, great lasting friendships that are, you know, steeped in this whole experience. So I wonder what other kind of connections you might have to IBMA other than from the standpoint of being a writer.

00:07:04 David Menconi

I -- it's funny, it took me a few years to actually join the organization. Should have done it sooner than I did, but. It's been really interesting and cool to have them bring their big industry event here, and there were times -- I was at the News and Observer for 28 years. And the last, let me think about this, six years of my time here was when IBMA was here and covering the organization, they had some upheavals.

It's funny. There was kind of a crisis in the organization right after they came here with the World of Bluegrass 'cause it was so huge. I think they were unprepared for how big it was going to be and how to deal with that.

There were lots of resignations on the board and upheaval and turnover, but it all got sorted out and it's been a really wonderful, very successful partnership. I'll be real surprised if they can duplicate the success of it anywhere else, but we've got kind of the perfect setup for something like IBMA with big venues like the outdoor amphitheater. Real nice, big Convention Center. Walkable grid of downtown nightclubs. And, you know, excellent restaurants and other things that you'd like, and decent hotels. Yeah, it was a partnership that really thrived for a lot of reasons.

00:08:34 Joe Kendrick

David, you've got plenty of colleagues from media that are writers for all sorts of outlets, and you yourself a kind both an author and a writer. I wonder if you have any comment about, advice to young writers? What might be your biggest challenge right now and what might be your know, your biggest upside right now?

00:09:04 David Menconi

Wow. It is never. It has never been an easy nut to crack. Writing for a living. It might be harder now than ever, which is, it’s got a good side and a bad side. The good side is you can get your stuff out there with no filters very easily, just the push of a button. The downside is there's so much out there. How do you stand out in that ocean of content out there? Legacy Media is just dying from 1000 cuts. The newspaper I was at for 28 years, the news and observer we used to have 250 people in The Newsroom. When I left five years ago, we were down to 40. So you know, it's just evaporating fast.

00:09:45 Joe Kendrick

Meanwhile, profits are very good at a lot of those. Businesses, a lot of those media, you know behemoths. Gannett, you know, I'm looking at you.

00:09:59 David Menconi

Yeah, they make more money than you'd think. In the case of my former employer, they got under billions in debt from a really ill advised merger, and that was the big problem. So even though they were making money on the balance sheet, they. Had just hundreds of millions of dollars in interest payments. They were having to make, they restructure some and put off some of that, but my gosh they were laying off tons of people every month for a long while there, it was pretty dispiriting to be a part of the death of newspaper media.

00:10:36 Joe Kendrick

What do you think of the, all of the DIY platforms that you have available now? Like a Substack -- or do you participate in any of that?

00:10:43 David Menconi

There's some really good ones. I do not have a substack of my own. I certainly read a fair amount like Ted Gioia is one that I read religiously. I think he's a really good thinker about music and culture in general.

So yeah, there's certainly good content out there. I mean, it feels like now more than ever we need filters and gatekeepers and. That really has gone away. It's just kind of poke around out there, see what you find, that you like and bookmark it and come back to it.

00:11:18 Joe Kendrick

It's such a fast culture and I think retention is really the big hurdle for at least me. I, I won't say for everybody, but there's so much content, so fast and it's such eye candy and it's so distracting. It's hard not to get caught up in that whirlwind when you're making content you know, and I hate that word content, but here we are. So a writer, you know, somebody making videos, you know you're making content and that's where it's at nowadays is all about that, how you can leverage that content.

00:11:55 David Menconi

Pivot to videos. There was, that was one of our eras. As the newspaper thrashed around and they really wanted us to do videos and most of them were terrible, at least the ones I made because I just have no aptitude for it. You know, I have things I can do well and things I can’t and I felt like the last few years I was at the paper, what I was good at was no longer in demand. And what they, what they wanted I could. I could do OK but. I feel like I got out when I should have.

[“Tango Cool“ by Ted Gioia & Mark Lewis, from Tango Cool, excerpt]

This is a bit of Ted Gioia’s song “Tango Cool“, the title track from his 1990 album with Mark Lewis. David mentioned reading his work religiously, and coincidentally, I have been reading his fascinating book, Music To Raise The Dead, for free, on Gioia’s page on Substack, which is a website and app geared towards writers. Ted’s page there is titled The Honest Broker, and is well worth checking out. He writes about more than music, too -- the state of education in a recent article titled “What’s Happening To Students”; also media, in an article titled “Why Journalism Is Like Stinky Cheese”, to give you a couple of examples.

Coming up, David Menconi talks about his book Oh, Didn’t They Ramble: Rounder Records and the Transformation of American Roots Music, after we get an ear for one of the record label’s milestones, which came in the year 1972. Norman Blake was the first artist to get an advance from Rounder Records for his album Back Home In Sulphur Springs, a princely sum of $500 for the collection which went on to sell thirty thousand copies. In folk-festival picking circles, it became an essential album, and this song was especially celebrated: “Ginseng Sullivan”

[“Ginseng Sullivan” by Norman Blake, from Back Home In Sulphur Springs, excerpt]

00:12:32 Joe Kendrick

Can you tell us a little bit about the Rounder book, what you've got on the radar, how that's rolled out?

00:12:38 David Menconi

Of course. It is a history of Rounder records, which is quite a tale. Rounder grew out of the folk revival of the 50s and 60s, and kind of in the shadow of that. At a time when the major labels the big companies already established were no longer interested in those folk acts they had been putting records out on in the wake of Tom Dooley, Kingston Trio. And Rounder started out as this hippie collective. 3 young, idealistic people and grew into arguably the biggest independent label in the world.

They started out putting out folk and bluegrass records -- George Pegram and old timers like that, and moved on to the, the youngins pretty quickly -- Spark Gap Wonder Boys from Boston were one of their early bands. And they had a hand in the careers over the years of some really important major acts. Tony Trishka, Béla Fleck. Later on Alison Krauss. They had some wild card hits too. Like George Thorogood, the Blues rock guitar player. He came along at a time when they were still very much in their acoustic folk and bluegrass thing, playing this loud, raunchy rock'n'roll, and they got talked into putting it out. And it was improbably successful.

It's kind of, you could subtitle the Rounder Records story the Kismet story. Because just so many times they had good fortune. To wind up signing somebody at just the right time. Alison Krauss, being another. They signed her when she was a teenager and within a decade she was one of the biggest pop stars out there, and that paid a lot of bills for a lot of years.

So. The founders of the company ran it for about 40 years before selling it. And they donated their archive to the University of North Carolina's Southern Folklife Collection. So, UNC press was interested in a book about them, and they had me do it. I was not the first they contacted. I was the 3rd, and I was working on another book for them before that, and their excuse was, “Well, you were busy with the North Carolina history book or you would have been our first choice” and I was skeptical about this. I told them, “Yeah, I bet you tell all the girls that.” But I was the one who actually signed on and got it done.

And it's, it's been. We've done a lot of readings and stuff, some of them with the three Rounder founders who are still, they are somehow running another record company all these years later. Which kind of blows me away. Ken Irwin, the oldest of them, just turned 80 years old, and he's launching a new label called Down the Road Records. And doing the same kind of folk and bluegrass sort of stuff he has always loved and always done and. He will be scurrying around looking for his next act to sign here this week. I don't know how he does it.

[“Move It On Over” by George Thorogood & the Destroyers, from Move It On Over, excerpt]

Going back to the very beginning of George Thorogood & the Destroyers catalog for that excerpt of the Hank Williams classic done blues style by the trio of George Thorogood on guitar and vocals, Jeff Simon on drums and Bill Blough on bass. This is another pivotal moment for Rounder Records, whose three founders David Menconi refers to simply as The Rounders, Ken Irwin, Marian Leighton Levy, and Bill Nowlin. The Rounders were reluctant to sign this journeyman bar-band guitarist from Delaware, mainly because his amped-up blues-rock was such a far cry from anything they had put out, even the blues records they had released, which were acoustic. But one of his biggest fans, who was also a regular visitor to Rounder Records, had a lot to do with getting Thorogood signed to the label, and Thorogood himself was persistent enough to win them over; it worked out magnificently. After some radio airplay all the way across the country at a station in San Francisco got the ball rolling, the 1978 LP Move It On Over became Rounder’s first to make onto the Billboard charts, and also the label’s first gold record.

As our conversation continued, I asked David Menconi about his take on new media, and how record labels that followed in Rounder’s footsteps have fared in the era since they had hits with George Thorogood, and later, Alison Krauss:

00:16:02 David Menconi

Well, the record industry has kind of, you know, mirrored the rest of the world and the culture and the economy, and that the 1% is doing better than they ever have. The record industry in the US, it would probably be overstating it to say they nearly died a decade ago. But it wasn't that far off. They lost more than half their revenue in a few short years from the online revolution. People just stopped buying pieces of plastic and did all their listening online, a lot of it. File sharing and downloading and what not that they weren't getting paid for. So they went from $15 billion a year in revenue down to less than half that.

And they were desperately trying everything to, to make, find something that would work. Things like ringtones and stuff like that. They, they did throw out a -- remember that when you'd actually buy a phone ringtone.

00:16:58 Joe Kendrick

Ringtones. They made so much money on ringtones.

00:17:03 David Menconi

They really did! Yeah, it worked for a few years, but then they hit on streaming and man, that is when another financial Golden Age for the corporate record label media kicked in. They now make over $20 billion a year, but boy is that concentrated. So the Taylor Swifts and Beyoncés of the world are doing great, absolutely mopping up. Your Interscopes and Sonys are doing fine and everybody else is kind of scrambling for table scraps.

Twas ever thus, it's just maybe drawn the lines a little harder and made the gap a little wider, the way things are. But it's, you know, not that far off from the old days that people pined for. There never was a huge middle class in the music industry, but like everywhere else, it's shrinking, you know.

00:17:57 Joe Kendrick

I'd say there's a resiliency here in the roots music world. In the bluegrass world. I just see lots and more in, renewed interest in young generations and people from, you know, being practically a toddler to being 90 are out there picking this week especially, but I see that as a really healthy sign for this corner of the music world.

00:18:29 David Menconi

Well, that's the good and the bad thing about this kind of music. It never gets huge with a few rare exceptions. Your Billy Strings or Alison Krauss's aside, but it never goes away all the way either. So it kind of rises and falls. You'll have an Alison. You'll have an O brother where art. Where it briefly comes into fashion and is arena sized for a brief period. And then it recedes and you're back to the usual folk festivals and world of bluegrass and things like that. And that's fine.

And you know, I don't think anybody really gets into this style of music. Thinking you're going to be top of the charts and it takes a lot of fluky things for that to happen. You know, a Cohen brothers movie with sort of a quirky soundtrack, something like that.

But yeah, the great thing about the modern era is as hard as it is to make it, quote, unquote, in the mainstream way that used to be, it doesn't seem to be stopping anybody. Some of the best records I hear now are local artists. Just self releasing stuff. You know, it seems more pointless than ever to chase after that major label record deal, and it just, it doesn't have to be a drawback not being signed.

00:19:51 Joe Kendrick

Yeah, the whole DIY spirit is thriving and widespread in this community. So in that sense, they're doing pretty well because they have a job. They get to play music a whole lot. They love that, it enriches their life. They can sell a few records. They can tour or you know, become a full time band and that happens fairly often regularly. And those people do, you know, not arena size like you said, but it can be a, a pretty good career.

00:20:25 David Menconi

Yeah, it really can. And then there are the occasional exceptions. Billy Strings now is, is the big one right now. It blows me away how huge he's gotten. And it's just, it's like the Grateful Dead. It's like the live thing. I’m not really aware of what his record sales are like. I assume they're at least respectable, but you know, selling out all these arena sized places, this is just really a tribute.

[“Away From the Mire” by Billy Strings, from Home]

Billy Strings here as we begin to wrap up this episode of Southern Songs and Stories, with one of David Menconi’s picks from his companion playlist to his book on Rounder Records. I put the link to his playlist in the show notes, and you can also find it on Spotify. David said that he did not know what Billy Strings’ record sales are like, but it will likely come as no surprise to you that Billy’s record sales are quite strong, indeed, historic! He is no longer on Rounder Records, which had been in the hands of Concord Music Group for almost a decade when the song you are hearing now was released, but his 2024 album Highway Prayers made it to the top overall spot on the Billboard albums chart; it was the first bluegrass album to make it to the number one slot since another Rounder release did it back in 2002, with the soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou?

This song, “Away From the Mire” is from Billy’s first album on Rounder, the 2019 collection titled Home, which did not break any sales records, but did win the Grammy Award for the best bluegrass album, the first of his two Grammys so far, which add to a slew of IBMA awards, which range from New Artist of the Year to Guitarist of the Year, to Song of the Year, and Entertainer of the Year.

Currently, David Menconi is freelancing, considering whether to start writing another book, and actively working on bringing books into the UNC Press series he edits called American Music: New Roots, which has some similarities to the American Music Series he co-founded at University of Texas Press and edited for nearly a decade. The American Music: New Roots series kicked off last fall with Eddie Huffman’s biography of Doc Watson, followed by Sam Stephenson on jazz pianist Bill Evans, and Tommy Goldsmith on bluegrass legends the Stanley Brothers.

Thank you so much for sharing your time with us, and we hope you can help us by spreading word about what we are doing. It is as easy as telling a friend and following this podcast on your platform of choice. From there it takes just a moment to give us a top rating, and where it is an option, a review! It makes a huge difference because the more top reviews and ratings we get, the more visible we become to everyone on those platforms, which means that more people just like you connect with artists you enjoy here.

This series is a part of the lineup of both public radio WNCW and Osiris Media, with all of the Osiris shows available at osirispod.com. You can also hear new episodes on Bluegrass Planet Radio at bluegrassplanetradio.com. Thanks to the IBMA for making this episode possible. Thanks also to Jaclyn Anthony for producing the radio adaptations of this series on public radio WNCW, where we worked with Joshua Meng who wrote and performed our theme songs. I am your host and producer Joe Kendrick, and this is Southern Songs and Stories: the music of the South and the artists who make it.