Known professionally as “The Singing Brakeman” and “America’s Blue Yodeler,”
generally considered “The Fadier of Country Music.” Largely ignored for many years by
folksong collectors because of his identity as a popular entertainer on commercial records
and radio, more recendy Rodgers has been recognized as an important link widi a
valuable body of older traditional music, especially the country blues of Black musicians,
which he heard growing up in the Deep Soudi and drew on heavily for his famous “Blue
Yodels” and other blues-related songs. He was, as John Greenway pointed out as early as
1957, “a folksong catalyst” who “had a most pervasive if not profound effect on
American folksong” (Greenway 1957:231).
Born in Meridian, Mississippi, the son of a railroad section foreman, Rodgers
developed show business aspirations early in life. At the age of thirteen, he won an
amateur talent contest in his hometown and shortly afterward ran away to join a traveling
medicine show. When those efforts came to nothing, he was put to work on the railroad
by his father and spent the next dozen years or so at a variety of jobs on “the high iron”—
as call boy, flagman, baggage master, brakeman—which took him far and wide across the
nation. Throughout the period prior to World War I and into the 1920s, Rodgers made
repeated attempts to earn a living as an entertainer but without success. After developing
tuberculosis in 1924, he found the physical demands of railroading increasingly difficult
and began to turn his attention full-time to his music, organizing amateur bands, playing
on street corners, taking any small entertainment job he could find. Again, the results
were meager and discouraging.
Rodgers’s first big break came in August 1927. By this time he had located in
Asheville, North Carolina, where he fronted a string band known as the Jimmie Rodgers
Entertainers and broadcast briefly on the local radio station, WWNC. Learning that Ralph
Sylvester Peer, an agent for the Victor Talking Machine Company, was making field
recordings of area entertainers in nearby Bristol, Tennessee, he impulsively loaded up the
band and went there with the hope of gaining an audition. Before they could record,
however, the band broke up, and Rodgers convinced Peer to let him make his first
recordings solo, accompanied only by his own guitar.
Within a year, he was fast becoming a star of national stature. Billed as “The Singing
Brakeman” and “America’s Blue Yodeler,” Rodgers played first-run theaters in major
cities, broadcast on radio stations throughout the country, and embarked on an extensive
vaudeville tour through the South on the prestigious Loew Circuit. In the ensuing five
years, he traveled to numerous cities across the nation, including New York and
Hollywood, to record for Victor, and eventually recorded 110 titles, including such
classics as “Blue Yodel No. 1” (“T for Texas”). “Waiting for a Train,” “In the Jailhouse
Now,” “Frankie and Johnny,” “Treasures Untold,” “My Old Pal,” “T.B.Blues,” “My
Little Lady,” “My Blue-Eyed Jane,” “The One Rose,” “Miss the Mississippi and You,”
and the series of twelve sequels to “Blue Yodel” for which he was most famous. In the
course of his brief career, Rodgers recorded with numerous other musicians of the time,
including such “hillbilly” or country-music names as the Carter Family and Clayton
McMichen, and in at least one instance with a star of major national prominence—Louis
Armstrong, who appears with him on “Blue Yodel No. 9.” In 1931 he toured with a Red
Cross benefit show headed by Will Rogers, who jokingly called him “my distant son.”
During the years from 1928 to 1932, Rodgers’ caree was at its pinnacle. By late 1932,
the Depression and his failing health had begun to take their toll. Audiences for live
entertainment shrank, record sales plummeted, and Rodgers was too ill to undertake the
ambitious film projects and international tours he had planned. After a sporadic effort to
book theater dates in the spring of 1933, he went to New York to fulfill a contract with
Victor for twelve recordings. Scarcely able to stand before the microphone, he rested
between takes on a cot set up in a rehearsal room across the hall. On May 26, two days
after finishing the sessions, he collapsed on the street and died a few hours later in his
room at the Hotel Taft.
Although Rodgers’ career and resulting fame derived largely from his commercial
recordings, the roots of his art were in the traditional melodies and folk music of his
Southern upbringing. As a boy, he was exposed to a vast body of musical influences
typical of that time and place: down-home fiddling, the banjo ditties of medicine show
minstrels, the old standard church hymns absorbed by almost every Southern
consciousness, even the light classics and maudlin tearjerkers of the Victorian stage
favored by the maiden aunt who raised him. Later, in his teens and early twenties,
roaming the country as a railroad brakeman, he was drawn to the rhythmic work chants
and keening country blues of the Black section-crew laborers, “gandy-dancers” who sang
as they set new rail ties or hung about the roundhouse.
From these diverse strains, Rodgers fashioned songs that somehow retained their fme
old homespun flavor yet were strikingly fresh and original. At least a third of his 110
recorded titles are variants of traditional songs or contain elements that can be traced
back to folksong origins. In turn, many of those Rodgers recordings—“T for Texas,”
“Waiting for aTrain, “Frankie and Johnny,” “In the Jailhouse Now”—carried the tradition
forward, not merely as the “country classics” of music-industry hyperbole but as familiar
standards in the consciousness of a broad segment of the population. Although Rodgers
often altered and rearranged the anonymous folk material he had absorbed as a youngster,
in adapting it to the new technology of the 20th century—for wider audiences reached by
phonograph record and radio—he performed a key role in preserving, transmitting, and
disseminating vital elements of American musical culture.
The folk-like process of altering sources and recombining scattered elements can be
seen in Rodgers’ first recording. For “The Soldier’s Sweetheart,” he drew on variants
dating back to the Spanish-American War, borrowed the tune to “Where the River
Shannon Flows,” and, in memory of a friend killed in the Argonne Forest, updated the
setting to World War I. A similar instance is “Waiting for a Train,” which, in fact, can be
traced back to a stage recitation of the mid-1800s but which had passed through any
number of “folk” variants before it reached Rodgers, including “Danville Girl,” “Wild
and Reckless Hobo,” “Ten Thousand Miles from Home,” and others now authoritatively
collected as genuine folksongs.
The thirteen “Blue Yodels” display a panoply of the maverick phrases and vagrant
stanzas common in African American blues; through the years, several have been collected as “authentic Negro songs” by folksong scholars to whom Rodgers was
unknown. The Blue Yodels are, in the words of country-music historian Bill C.Malone,
Rodgers’ “unique contribution to American folksong” (Malone 1985:86). Other songs
made popular by Rodgers but not written by him have also been admitted to the canon.
So eminent an authority as Frank C.Brown thought that “Away Out on the Mountain,”
composed for Rodgers by Kelly Harrell, bore clear internal evidence of being a folksong
and might even be “a relic of the days of Davy Crockett” (Belden and Hudson 1952:371).
Rodgers’ popularity was such that he himself became a folkloristic icon of sorts as the
subject of numerous folktales about his life and adventures. Bits of folk-say involved
titles of songs he had made popular, and there were several versions of how he had
“invented” the yodel when he eyed some attractive woman (whose occupation varied
from story to story) and sang out, “I see your legs-o-lady-dee-hee.” Anthropologist Hugh
Tracey, working among the Kipsigi tribe of East Africa in the 1950s, reported a female
puberty rite in which the young maidens chanted seductively before a centaur-god, half
man and half antelope, known as “Chemirocha”—Kipsigi pronunciation of “Jinimie
Rodgers,” whose magnetic appeal on old records had moved them to elevate him to the
status of a demigod (Oliver 1959:10).
Nolan Porterfield
References
Belden, Henry M., and Arthur Palmer Hudson, eds. 1952. The Frank C.Brown Collection of North
Carolina Folklore. Vol. 3. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Greenway, John. 1957. Jimmie Rodgers: A Folksong Catalyst. Journal of American Folklore
70:231–234.
Malone, Bill C. 1985. CountryMusic U.S.A. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Oliver, Paul. 1959. Jimmy [sic] Rodgers. Recorded Folk Music 2:10.
Porterfield, Nolan. 1979. Jimmie Rodgers: The Life and Ttmes of America’s Blue Yodeler. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press.