Revenant Records is a record label

Record label

In the music industry, a record label is a brand and a trademark associated with the marketing of music recordings and music videos. Most commonly, a record label is the company that manages such brands and trademarks, coordinates the production, manufacture, distribution, marketing and promotion,...

 based in Austin, Texas

Austin, Texas

Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of :Texas and the seat of Travis County. Located in Central Texas on the eastern edge of the American Southwest, it is the fourth-largest city in Texas and the 14th most populous city in the United States. It was the third-fastest-growing large city in...

, which concentrates on folk

Folk music

Folk music is an English term encompassing both traditional folk music and contemporary folk music. The term originated in the 19th century. Traditional folk music has been defined in several ways: as music transmitted by mouth, as music of the lower classes, and as music with unknown composers....

 and blues

Blues

Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads...

. Revenant was formed in 1996

1996 in music

This is a list of notable events in music that took place in the year 1996.-January:* January – At the trial of two American teenagers, Nicholaus McDonald and Brian Bassett, for the murder of Bassett's parents and young brother, defense lawyers attempt to lay the blame for the murders on the fact...

 by John Fahey

John Fahey (musician)

John Fahey was an American fingerstyle guitarist and composer who pioneered the steel-string acoustic guitar as a solo instrument. His style has been greatly influential and has been described as the foundation of American Primitivism, a term borrowed from painting and referring mainly to the...

 and Dean Blackwood. Revenant's 2001 box set, Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues: The Worlds of Charley Patton

Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues: The Worlds of Charley Patton

Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues: The Worlds of Charley Patton is a boxed set collecting Charley Patton's recorded works. It also features recordings by many of his friends and associates, as well as supplementary interviews and historical data...

, won three Grammy Award

Grammy Award

A Grammy Award — or Grammy — is an accolade by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences of the United States to recognize outstanding achievement in the music industry...

s in 2003.

Revenant also gained fame among free jazz

Free jazz

Free jazz is an approach to jazz music that was first developed in the 1950s and 1960s. Though the music produced by free jazz pioneers varied widely, the common feature was a dissatisfaction with the limitations of bebop, hard bop, and modal jazz, which had developed in the 1940s and 1950s...

 fans in 2004 when it released Holy Ghost: Rare & Unissued Recordings (1962-70)

Holy Ghost: Rare & Unissued Recordings (1962-70)

Holy Ghost: Rare & Unissued Recordings is a compilation album by avant-garde saxophonist Albert Ayler released by Revenant Records in 2004...

, a 9-disc

Compact Disc

The Compact Disc is an optical disc used to store digital data. It was originally developed to store and playback sound recordings exclusively, but later expanded to encompass data storage , write-once audio and data storage , rewritable media , Video Compact Discs , Super Video Compact Discs ,...

 box set of rare and unissued recordings and interviews by saxophonist Albert Ayler

Albert Ayler

Albert Ayler was an American avant-garde jazz saxophonist, singer and composer.Ayler was among the most primal of the free jazz musicians of the 1960s; critic John Litweiler wrote that "never before or since has there been such naked aggression in jazz" He possessed a deep blistering tone—achieved...

.

Revenant also released Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, Vol. 4.