Jim Rooney Papers

Background on Jim Rooney

A producer, performer, writer, and pioneer in Americana music, Jim Rooney was born in Boston on January 28, 1938 and raised in Dedham, MA. Inspired to take up music by the sounds of Hank Williams and Leadbelly he heard on the radio, he began performing at the Hillbilly Ranch at just 16 years old. After graduating with an undergraduate degree in Classics from Amherst College Bill Keith, and a Masters degree in Classics from Harvard University, he formed a band with Amherst College classmate Bill Keith and others to recorded “Living on the Mountain.” In 1963, he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to study in Athens, Greece at the The American School of Classical Studies. Ending his studies at Harvard in 1964, he then went on to start his full-time career in music.

Rooney started managing Club 47 in 1965 and was at the epicenter of the folk revival in Boston. That fall, he became part of the Board of Directors on the Newport Music Foundation. After producing the New Orlean Jazz Festival and becoming a tour manager of Jazz shows in 1968, he became director and talent coordinator for the Newport Folk Festival. In 1970 he wrote his first book Bossmen: Bill Monroe & Muddy Waters. After managing Bearsville Sound Studios from 1971-1972 in Woodstock, NY, for Albert Grossman, he went on to travel to Europe with Bill Keith to play, moving to Nashville shortly thereafter. In 1975, he relocated to Massachusetts, formed the band “Partners in Crime”, and played gigs around New England before returning to Nashville in 1976. Rooney then went on to tour Japan with other musicians, including long-term friend Bill Keith. He continued his writing career in 1978 with the publication of Baby, Let Me Follow You Down with Eric von Schmidt. He then went on to tour Europe with the Woodstock Mountains Revue and then The Dead Cowboys, and finally settled back down in Nashville. There, he started his producing both Nanci Griffith and John Prine, and also formed the New Blue Velvet Band with Bill Keith, Eric Weissberg and Kenny Kosek. Becoming a writer for Forerunner Music in the mid-1980s, he went on to write with people such as Pat Alger, Hal Ketchum, Tony Arata, Tim O’Brien, and Pete Wasner for artists that include Garth Brooks, Kathy Mattea, Patty Loveless, Vince Gill, Hal Ketchum, and Trisha Yearwood. In 1989, he helped organize the documentary Bringing it All Back Home in Nashville to highlight how Irish music has reached all over the world. He then went on to work with Iris DeMent and won a Grammy for his work as a producer on Nanci Griffith’s “Other Voices, Other Rooms”. In 2000, he started playing gigs with “Rooney’s Irregulars” at the Station Inn in Nashville. Rooney received a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009 from the American Music Association.

In 2014, he wrote a memoir, In it for the Long Run . Rooney currently spends 4-5 months each year in Ireland with his wife, Carol Langstaff, and resides in Vermont during the rest of the year.