Red House Records is an American independent record label specializing in folk music and is based in St. Paul, Minnesota.
The label was originally created in 1981 by Greg Brown as a method to distribute his own music, and is named for a farmhouse in Iowa where he was living. After Brown's albums 44 & 66 and The Iowa Waltz were released in 1981 and 1982, it briefly went dormant until he met Bob Feldman in 1983. Feldman took over operation of the record label, while Brown focused on his musical endeavors (he had just signed on to regularly perform on the radio program A Prairie Home Companion). Feldman was known for his business philosophy "to provide a home and environment in which creative artists can make albums in total freedom—without interference from mogul types just looking for the next hit single." The first album released on the newly-restarted label was Brown's In the Dark with You.
Over the next few years, the label focused on publishing work by musicians in the upper Midwest, including Spider John Koerner, Prudence Johnson, Peter Ostroushko, Rio Nido, Jorma Kaukonen and John Gorka. The label weathered difficult conditions as the music industry transitioned from vinyl to compact discs, and started signing established artists from across the U.S. Utah Phillips, Tom Paxton, Norman Blake, Eliza Gilkyson, Loudon Wainwright III, Robin and Linda Williams, Cliff Eberhardt, and Ramblin' Jack Elliott are among the dozens of performers who have released music through Red House. Elliot's South Coast won a Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album in 1996. Eberhardt's album, The High Above and the Down Below, released by Red House in 2007, was named one of the TOP 5 of 2007 by USA Today. Other recordings from the label have racked up about a dozen Indie Awards from the Association for Independent Music (AFIM) and the National Association of Independent Record Distributors (NAIRD). The label has released a number of compilation albums, including A Nod to Bob, which is described by Red House as a tribute from a Minnesota label to a favorite native son.
Feldman continued to head the company until his health deteriorated in late 2005. A few weeks after leaving work, he died on January 11, 2006 at the age of 56.
Red House Records has recently signed Storyhill, an acoustic duo originally from Bozeman Montana.
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Famous quotes containing the words red, house and/or records:
“This is a red wine glass. Can I get my water in a water glass, please?”
—Michael Tolkin, U.S. screenwriter, and Robert Altman. Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins)
“The talk shows are stuffed full of sufferers who have regained their health—congressmen who suffered through a serious spell of boozing and skirt-chasing, White House aides who were stricken cruelly with overweening ambition, movie stars and baseball players who came down with acute cases of wanting to trash hotel rooms while under the influence of recreational drugs. Most of them have found God, or at least a publisher.”
—Calvin Trillin (b. 1935)
“What a wonderful faculty is memory!—the most mysterious and inexplicable in the great riddle of life; that plastic tablet on which the Almighty registers with unerring fidelity the records of being, making it the depository of all our words, thoughts and deeds—this faithful witness against us for good or evil.”
—Susanna Moodie (1803–1885)