Born in New York City and raised in Westchester, NY, Rounder Records co-owner and co-founder Ken Irwin never planned on a career in the music industry. Despite a casual interest in folk music as a teenager, after high school, he landed at Tufts University in Massachusetts. There he became a psych major, later completing a graduate degree in Special Education and was ABD (“all but dissertation”) for the doctorate in Human Development and Family Studies at Cornell. In 1970, Irwin, Bill Nowlin, and Marian Leighton Levy started Rounder Records, with the simultaneous release of albums by old-time banjo player George Pegram and young old-timey Cambridge stringband the Spark Gap Wonder Boys. With such modest beginnings and equally humble goals, Rounder started to build its catalogue, documenting what one reviewer of that period referred to as “roots music and its contemporary offshoots.”

Irwin was actively involved in signing and discovering new artists. Irwin was responsible for signing previously unsung talents including Alison Krauss, Béla Fleck, Mark O’Connor, Jerry Douglas, Ricky Skaggs, George Thorogood, Buckwheat Zydeco, and, more recently, Bradley Walker, James Hand, Harley Allen, Donna Hughes, Sierra Hull, and Dailey & Vincent, among others. Among the bluegrass and old-time artists he has worked with are Hazel Dickens, James King, Del McCoury, IIIrd Tyme Out, the Johnson Mountain Boys, Bobby Osborne, Jeannie Kendall, the Whitstein Brothers, and many more. He also helped to raise awareness of bluegrass’s first generation, producing and licensing a series of crucial reissues by some of the music’s legendary early figures, including Jimmy Martin, Bill Monroe, Jim & Jesse, Flatt & Scruggs, and others — keeping this essential music in print when few other labels did so. Irwin has also created many illuminating and bestselling compilations drawn from Rounder’s archive of over 3,000 albums, among them the remarkable O, Sister: A Women’s Bluegrass Collection (which doubled as a document of Rounder’s extensive efforts to promote female bluegrass musicians), Blue Trail of Sorrow, and Bluegrass #1s. Outside of bluegrass, Irwin has been involved with producing a string of Grammy-winning polka records with bandleader Jimmy Sturr.

When not on the road, in the studio, at a festival, or at a conference, Ken lives with his wife in a coastal city north of Boston and still feels the same excitement and passion for the music that he always has.