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Jimmie
Rodgers
by
Tom Piazza
Jimmie
Rodgers, also known as the Singing Brakeman and America's
Blue Yodeler, was a true original. The archetype of the guitar-playing
singer-songwriter, Rodgers opened a door onto a broad avenue
of expression that ran both forward and backward in American
folk life and popular culture. From his first recordings,
in 1927, to his last, recorded on the eve of his death in
1933, his career was a meeting point for images and folk material
from the American South and West, from black and white traditions,
and it offered clues to ways in which that material could
be blended into the main stream of popular music.
Rodgers'
career straddled the years when America stood on, then slid
over, the brink of Depression. His songs, which include some
of the best-known tunes in the country repertoire, evoked
both the expansive frontier spirit and the longing, backward
glance toward home. Along with the Carter Family and a handful
of others, he was both a preserver and a popularizer of a
precious body of expression. And in many ways he extended
that tradition as well, crossing the color line to record
with black artists such as Louis Armstrong and blues guitarist
Clifford Gibson and, with his short 1929 film The Singing
Brakeman, starring in what could be thought of as one
of the first music videos.
Born
September 8, 1897 near Meridian, Mississippi to a railroadman
father and a mother who died when he was four years old, Rodgers
was on the move from his earliest days. He began performing
in his early teens, winning an amateur talent contest in Meridian
and traveling briefly with a medicine show before going to
work full-time for the railroads, out of Meridian. For the
next fifteen years, Rodgers worked as a section hand and brakeman
on railroad lines throughout the South and West, occasionally
picking up work as an entertainer. He appeared on radio and
in tent shows, and also apparently during this period picked
up the lung inflammation that would later be diagnosed as
tuberculosis and go on to kill him.
In
1927, in a moment that has long since passed into legend,
Rodgers recorded two titles in Bristol, Tennessee during the
marathon "Bristol Sessions," organized by Victor A&R man Ralph
Peer, the first concerted effort to record white rural music
-- then called "hillbilly" music -- for the popular market.
Peer recorded many singers and instrumentalists in addition
to Rodgers during those weeks of recording, including the
equally significant Carter Family, and those records' brisk
sales fueled the growth of what was to become the country
music industry.
Rodgers
was invited back to the studios in short order, this time
to the Victor studios in Camden, New Jersey, where he recorded
the first of his Blue Yodels (the famous "T for Texas"). Rodgers'
Blue Yodels, of which he recorded 13, along with numerous
other songs that fit the form but were not designated as such
(like "Jimmie's Texas Blues" and "No Hard Times"), were a
genre within a genre. Loosely strung outlaw blues lyrics,
sung in a sly, jaunty manner, alternated with Rodgers' trademark
yodel in a unique overlay of the Southern rounder and the
Western cowboy, literally and symbolically representing a
blending of the streams of white and black rural music.
Rodgers
recorded copiously during his six years in the studios. His
songs ranged across the spectrum from tough blues to sentimental
odes to home and mother, and they reflected an America with
much of the 19th Century still clinging to it -- lusting for
mobility and change and in love with the furious pursuit of
technology which made that possible (trains, of course, but
also the phonographs and radios on which messages from far
away could be heard like train whistles in the night), yet
also sentimental to a fault about mother and home and innocence,
the past that was being mortgaged to pay for all that mobility.
In Rodgers' repertoire, songs like "Train Whistle Blues,"
"Let Me Be Your Sidetrack," and "My Rough and Rowdy Ways"
exist side-by-side with "Mother, The Queen of my Heart," "The
Land of My Boyhood Dreams," and "Down the Old Road to Home."
Earnings
from his recordings enabled Rodgers to build a large house
for his family in Kerrville, Texas, a location chosen partly
for health reasons. But it was not in Rodgers to stay still,
and a constant touring and recording schedule only hurt his
chances of recovering from TB. His recordings were phenomenally
popular with rural Southern audiences, even in the depths
of the Depression. In May 1933, with his health rapidly deteriorating,
Rodgers traveled to New York City to make a long series of
recordings over the course of eight days. He was so weak that
the producer had to provide a cot in the studio, on which
he rested between songs. The effort was too much for him,
finally, and Rodgers died in New York's Hotel Taft on May
26.
The
list of those whom Rodgers influenced directly is very long,
including Gene Autry, Bill Monroe, Ernest Tubb, Hank Snow,
Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard and many others.
Rodgers' influence in the country field is inescapable, both
in his singing and guitar style and in the repertoire of songs
he wrote or popularized, including "Waiting For A Train,"
"Miss The Mississippi and You," "My Carolina Sunshine Gal,"
"Peach Picking Time In Georgia," "He's In the Jailhouse Now,"
not to mention his Blue Yodels. His approach was to find later
resonance in the bluegrass of Bill Monroe, whose biggest early
hit was "Muleskinner Blues," a reworking of Rodgers' "Blue
Yodel #8," in such Hank Williams tunes as "Honky Tonk Blues"
and "Lovesick Blues" (on both of which Williams does a fair
yodel himself), and, eventually, in Rock and Roll music, with
its blending of white country and black blues traditions.
But
Rodgers' claim on our attention doesn't consist solely, or
even mainly, of his influence on later performers. Rodgers'
voice and guitar itself, haunting and pure, strong yet vulnerable,
rising out of recordings made nearly 70 years ago, still has
the power to fascinate, to inspire, to excite and to calm,
and to conjure an entire world in a few quick images.
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