Thanks for noticing the Musical Traditions releases of our North Amrican Traditions Series CDS (MT has also issued a 4 CD of Kentucky music drawn from our archives that never came out on Rounder). The situation with these recordings is the following. I own all of the masters, as my little NAT group was simply a private group of collectors working independently in the same vein as Lomax, say. But it was a great boon, in better years, for Bill Nowlin and Ken Irwin to harbor our little series on Rounder, because that opportunity supplied our artists with small advances and exposure on a larger label(unfortunately, the rest of the company was uninterested in our work and never publicized any of it in the same manner as did the peer folk labels of the time). Bill still works at Rounder and has hopes of encouraging further traditional releases under the Concord banner, but I'm not especially encouraging it, as I feel more comfortable releasing materials with Rod Stradling (even though we're lucky if he sells 25 copies of our releases--collectors note: these MT issues will one day prove rarer than early '30s Gennetts!) Many of the projects that came out as Rounder CD between 1995 and 2003 can still be purchased, in more or less their original form, from Amazon on a print-on-demand basis. For the time being, I am allowing Rounder to issue those records in that manner. With Musical Traditions, I am concentrating on reissuing the post-2003 issues which can't be duplicated for sundry reasons on Amazon (a few can't be rereleased easily without engaging in extensive and problematic contract negotiations with heirs, etc). If there's room, I've tried to fill out old releases with additional material (I'm planning to fill out our old LPs of Almeda Riddle, Sarah Gunning and others in that way as soon as I can). I also have quite a bit of unissued material that is worth getting out, but those will emerge rather slowly due to constraints on my time. As soon as the demise of old Rounder became evident, I initially tried to get several of the larger folk music archives interested in the collection but the best I could arrange is that they'd store them away in boxes somewhere. So I might as well hold onto it all and dribble out new releases as I find time.
    I'd like to stronly stress in closing that, even though my NAT group worked without pay, Bill and Ken still provided substantial amounts of money for the support of our field work in the form of advance rotalties, travel expenses and equipment in a era where, to the best of my knowledge, no other institution offered comparable support on such a scale. Through that support, our little group managed to preserve in good fidelity a fair portion of late twentieth century folk music that would have otherwise been lost.