Rounder Records is an independent record label founded in 1970 in Somerville, Massachusetts by Marian Leighton Levy, Ken Irwin, and Bill Nowlin. Focused on American roots music, Rounder's catalogue of more than 3000 titles includes records by Alison Krauss and Union Station, George Thorogood, Tony Rice, and Béla Fleck, in addition to re-releases of seminal albums by artists such as the Carter Family, Jelly Roll Morton, Lead Belly, and Woody Guthrie. "Championing and preserving the music of artists whose music falls outside of the mainstream," Rounder releases have won 54 Grammy Awards representing diverse genres, from bluegrass, folk, reggae, and gospel to pop, rock, Americana, polka and world music. Acquired by Concord in 2010, Rounder is based in Nashville, Tennessee. Beginnings Rounder was founded by Ken Irwin, Bill Nowlin, and Marian Leighton Levy. Nowlin and Irwin first met in 1962 as incoming freshman at Tufts University in the Boston suburb of Medford, Massachusetts. Exposure to The Greenbriar Boys, the Charles River Valley Boys, the Hillbilly at Harvard radio show, and fiddling conventions, as well as the musicians who performed at Club 47, one of the first venues in the Northeast to book African-American blues artists from the American south, fueled their interest in bluegrass, old-time, and other roots music. They were unable to find records by many of the artists they saw live: the records "just didn't exist." Nowlin and Irwin met Levy, then a student at Clark University, in 1967. An "unrepentant folkie," like Nowlin and Irwin, she moved to Boston to attend graduate school at Northeastern University. The three shared an apartment as well as a desire to bring roots music to a wider audience, and began to explore the idea of starting a record company. “We were all involved in radical politics, and the anti-war movement, and a lot of our inspiration for starting Rounder had to do with minority culture and wanting to represent music that we really liked, but that was not in the mainstream,” Levy said in a 2015 interview. The 1970s: George Pegram, Norman Blake, Rounder 0044, George Thorogood Financed with Irwin's savings of $1500, Rounder was founded in 1970 in the Somerville apartment, a living/working/political collective. The name Rounder was chosen for several reasons: the shape of a vinyl record, the nickname for a hobo, and the name of the folk band The Holy Modal Rounders. Levy, Irwin and Nowlin also self-identified