Original image by There Stands the Glass.
Declining a 1994 offer from my employer Rounder Distribution to relocate from Kansas City to Rounder’s home office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is among my biggest regrets. My successful campaign to install a bluegrass section at Walmart led to supplementary sales of hundreds of thousands of Alison Krauss albums in the South and Midwest. Rounder believed I could oversee similar initiatives nationally.
Yet as a new homeowner with an expanding family, the increased pay package in New England still would have meant downgrading my circumstances. I made the wrong decision. Distribution of compact discs and DVDs would be decimated within a dozen years, but attractive opportunities in parallel industries would have presented themselves when the time came to move on.
Reading David Menconi’s Oh, Didn't They Ramble: Rounder Records and the Transformation of American Roots Music, consequently, triggered me. The narrative is primarily told from the perspective of the denizens of the label’s headquarters. My story isn’t included in Menconi’s short history. Still, I enjoyed learning about the early lives of Rounder’s founders as well as the events that transpired after I was out of the picture. The work receives my qualified recommendation.