Bob Feldman, 56; President of Folk Label Red House Records

Bob Feldman, 56, a force in folk music and the president of Red House Records, died Wednesday at his home in St. Paul, Minn. The cause of death was not immediately known.

In 1983, Feldman restarted Red House, Iowa, singer-songwriter Greg Brown’s dormant independent label. The small business that Feldman ran out of his apartment grew to employ nine people and gross between $2 million and $3 million a year, according to the St. Paul-based label.

Over two decades, Red House released almost 200 titles by artists such as Robin and Linda Williams, Loudon Wainwright III, Bill Staines and Lucy Kaplansky.

Feldman grew up in Jacksonville, Fla., and saw his first folk festival in second grade. While teaching entrepreneurship to high school students, he connected with Brown after hearing the folk singer at a coffee shop.

To figure out how to run a record label, Feldman went to the library. “I found this book called ‘How to Make and Sell Your Own Record’ and I read it like it was a textbook,” he told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune in 1994.