From the online WSJ:''

"Airing on PBS stations this month (beginning Saturday) is "Rounder Records' 40th Anniversary Concert," a celebration of the storied and thriving Massachusetts-based independent music label. Artists performing range from bluegrass superstars Alison Krauss and Union Station to New Orleans soul queen Irma Thomas, singer-songwriter Mary Chapin Carpenter, rocking actress Minnie Driver, multigenre banjo virtuoso BŽla Fleck and Nathan & the Zydeco Cha Chas. They're all on the Rounder labelÑin some cases, for decades. (A companion CD with additional performances included is being released Wednesday, and an extended DVD on May 4.)

For the most part, independent record labels come and go, or get swept up into larger music-making conglomerates with new management, often with little institutional memory at all. Remarkably, RounderÑbegun in 1970 with a recording of old-time banjo player George Pegram, and the home last year of the Grammy-winning Album of the Year (Alison Krauss and Robert Plant's "Raising Sand")Ñis still helmed, if with a much larger executive staff, by the same three roots-music aficionados who started up the company with no industry experience whatsoever. The '60s folk-music revival was waning, and the whole range of music that Ken Irwin, Marian Leighton Levy and Bill Nowlin loved was becoming frustratingly hard to find.

In a recent phone interview, Mr. Irwin recalled: "Basically, this was my college roommate and my girlfriend of the time. We started out in the same three-alcove apartment, as a living and working collective, going to festivals to hear all the music together, traveling on that VW bus, seeing Muddy Waters and Bill Monroe and Doc Watson at Club 47 in Cambridge. We didn't even own a tape recorder. We were fans and hobbyists, thinking of the labels we'd known, 'Well, if they're not going to do it, maybe we could make available music that we like and think others would.'

"Early on, especially, we felt it was a mission; we were aware of how much music of the past was around that wasn't available, and how much was being made that needed to be preserved and shared. We would go to NAIRD [the National Association of Independent Record Distributors] with little notebooks and ask people 'Where do you go to get an LP made?' and 'What does it cost?' just trying to learn."

In "The Never-Ending Revival" (University of Illinois Press, 2008), author Michael F. Scully tracks how the firm came to realize that the performers themselves, whether "hippies" or "southern good ol' boys" on the face of it, wanted their music to be heard, to reach wider audiences, to be commercially successful. He described to me, in a separate interview, how the "Rounder Founders" proceeded from there:

"They went on to raise that roots-music flag high. The sheer quantityÑover 3,500 records by nowÑand the quality of their releases demanded attention for it. They made it plain that roots music was not just 'old stuff,' or even old-sounding stuff, but could be vibrant and beautifully recorded, and they put out records by working musicians who were ready to tour in professional shows, rather than just reviving older recordings. Unlike most post-folk-revival roots labels, they were never a one-genre label; they were more like a 50-genre label, and they showed that 'roots music' could be cool stuff. When you do all that, and reach as many people as they have, you start changing the concept of what roots or folk music is in the modern world."...