Indie dependent: Dolph Ramseur keeps harmony with the Avett Brothers and other artists on his tiny Concord-based record label.

• Author: Kemp, Mark
• Position: FEATURE

To Dolph Ramseur, the twang of finger-picked guitar combined with vocals sung in a deep Southern drawl is the music angels make. As a teenager, he spent many days at the Concord Public Library looking up old Piedmont blues musicians: Etta Baker, Blind Willie McTell, the Rev. Gary Davis. At night, he would tune his radio to Davidson College's campus station, where he heard very different sounds: the charging punk rock and brooding new wave of such early '80s bands as Dead Kennedys and Echo & the Bunnymen. What if these radically different styles could be merged, he wondered. Would the result sound as passionate and immediate as the rock 'n' roll that came out of Memphis in the 1950s?

More than two decades later, he has found that combination in the Avett Brothers, a Concord-based trio whose mix of old-time vocals and instrumentation--high-lonesome harmonies, banjo, guitar and upright bass--with the muscular force of rock has wowed audiences from Charlotte's Neighborhood Theatre to New York City's Bowery Ballroom. In the past three years, it has become one of North Carolina's most popular touring bands, performing across the country and in Europe and featured on national radio shows such as World Cafe and Mountain Stage. Its albums have been reviewed in publications from the indie-music magazine Paste to The Washington Post and even Men's Health. The next one--Emotionalism, due out May 15--will be its seventh release on tiny Ramseur Records.

The rise of an independent record company on a hot talent has been a familiar refrain since Sam Phillips signed a delivery-truck driver to his Sun Record Co. in 1954. Phillips later peddled the contract to a major label for a mere $40,000, but the deal made him a legend, RCA Victor a fortune and Elvis Presley the first bona fide rock star. Even though technological advances such as compact discs and selling music online have cut costs and lowered barriers to entering the business, few indies can hope for such acclaim. That's not the point, says Ramseur, who is 37 and runs his company out of his house. "We're basically in this thing because we love the music."

I was always a music nut, always collected music when I was a kid. I loved acoustic and traditional music, but I also gravitated to all the great punk and British rock that was coming out--anything that was real and honest." He's having lunch with Scott Avett, the band's leader and banjo player, at an Indian restaurant near UNC Charlotte. As Ramseur describes his love affair with music, Avett, 30, sits quietly, smiling at his passion. Ramseur becomes animated as he talks, raising his voice and gesturing with his hands. He suddenly lowers the volume to a near whisper. "I also could always tell when a musician was beginning to sell out, and I didn't like that. So I wanted to get in a position where I could really help people--give them a situation where they wouldn't have to sell out."

He had always wanted to be in the business, but growing up in Concord, where he still lives, he didn't know how. At 20, studying marketing and professional tennis management at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Mich., he came across a story about singer/songwriter Martin Stephenson in the...