Roots & Rhythm

Maybe you know it best as Down Home Music.  It was the catalog of choice if you didn't live near a Tower Records or even had a local record shop in your town.  What Down Home specialized in was ordering imports and from indie labels that wouldn't get stocked anywhere else.  The catalog itself was a thing of beauty:  reviews, honest and opinionated on the latest releases.  This was where I found out that there was life outside of Nashville Top 40, and that Blues had a deeper history than just the titans I knew about.

Sometime in the late 90's Down Home Music changed their name to Roots & Rhythm, but the quality of the catalogs was the same.  Yet things changed once the Internet took off.  You no longer needed a mail-order catalog to get the hard-to-find stuff.  Somehow they kept going.

But now things are coming to an end.  It's hard to keep a mail order business going nowadays.  And to be honest, most people reading their catalogs probably found the items cheaper online.

But I'll miss that bi-monthly catalog, which always showed up like an old friend.  Sorry to see it go and sorry that things always have to change.  Hats off to 'em.