Bill Nowlin Announces New Book About Rounder Records

Bill Nowlin, a founder of Nashville’s Rounder Records, is set to release a new book about his career with the label called Venture Vinyl: My Fifty Years at Rounder Records.

The new book, out on April 6, tells stories of Nowlin’s life-long career building the independent label.

Nowlin has written many books, though most have been about his love of baseball. This book focuses on the early years up to and just through when Rounder evolved to a second stage. It goes through how a generational change kept the label healthy and flourishing while so many other cultural enterprises from the era have folded or gone dark.

Venture Vinyl: My Fifty Years at Rounder Records includes original photographs taken by the Nowlin or drawn from the Rounder Records archives. It’s the story of three people with no background in business who took an idea and, through hard work and passion, built something of lasting cultural significance.

The Cambridge, Massachusetts native, along with Ken Irwin and Marian Leighton Levy started Rounder Records in 1970, born out of a “hobby that got out of control,” in the Boston-area.

The now Nashville-based produced over 3,000 albums, specializing in roots music and its contemporary offshoots. Rounder won 56 Grammy awards and documented a swath of music that in many cases might otherwise never have been presented to a broader public. It’s arguably a quintessentially American success story.

The book is published by UK based Equinox Publishing and will be available in paperback and ePUB editions on April 6.