Rodgers, Jimmie (actually, James Charles)

Rodgers, Jimmie (actually, James Charles) , American country singer, songwriter, and guitarist; b. Meridian, Miss., Sept. 8, 1897; d. N.Y., May 26, 1933. Rodgers was the first major country-music performer and a profound influence whose writing and performing styles served to define the genre. His music mixed folk, blues, jazz, and pop, and his frequently sentimental lyrics usually had a regional focus. He was also a distinctive singer, his style characterized by his “blue yodel.” Such successors as Roy Acuff, Bob Wills, and Bill Monroe showed his immediate influence in the 1930s and 1940s and often performed his songs. But his impact was just as strong on a later generation of performers including Hank Snow, Webb Pierce, and Hank Williams in the 1940s and 1950s and in turn on their successors, Lefty Frizzell, Johnny Cash, and Merle illiams in the 1940s and 1950s and his many compositions, “T for Texas,” “Mule Skinner Blues,” and “In the Jailhouse Now” are the best remembered.

Rodgers’s father, Aaron Woodberry Rodgers (originally Rogers), was a railroad worker. His mother, Eliza Bozeman Rodgers, died in 1903, and he was raised largely by an aunt. He left school in 1911 and, after a flirtation with performing, followed his father on the railroad. He married Stella Kelly on May 1, 1917, but the marriage was short-lived; though a daughter was born, the couple divorced in November 1919. On April 7, 1920, Rodgers married Carrie Williamson, with whom he had two more daughters, one of whom died in infancy. After suffering a lung hemorrhage in 1924, Rodgers was diagnosed with tuberculosis; thereafter he worked less frequently for the railroad, stopping completely in 1926. He returned to performing, sometimes working as a blackface banjo player in a medicine show.

Moving to Asheville, N.C., Rodgers performed on the radio in the spring of 1927. His breakthrough came when he was recorded by Ralph Peer for Victor Records in Bristol, Tenn., in August 1927. His first record, “Sleep, Baby, Sleep”/“The Soldier’s Sweetheart,” released in October, sold well, and Peer conducted another recording session in November that produced “Blue Yodel” (or, “T for Texas”), released in April 1928, which sold a million copies.

Over the next five years Rodgers recorded more than a hundred sides for Victor. His biggest hits were “In the Jailhouse Now” (released in April 1928); “The Brake-man’s Blues” (May 1928); “Blue Yodel No. 3” (September 1928); “Waiting for a Train” (February 1929); “Anniversary Yodel (Blue Yodel No. 7)” (music and lyrics also by Elsie McWilliams, Rodgers’s sister-in-law; November 1929); and “Roll Along, Kentucky Moon” (music and lyrics by Bill Halley; March 1932), though each of his releases sold in the hundreds of thousands, at least until the onset of the Depression. (Biographer Nolan Porterfield estimated that Rodgers had sold 12 million records in the U.S. by the late 1940s.)

Rodgers recorded in a variety of styles, from solo performances with his own guitar accompaniment to arrangements for Hawaiian and jazz bands. On “Blue Yodel No. 9” in 1930 he was accompanied by Louis Armstrong on trumpet; in 1931 he recorded with the Carter Family. Rodgers also performed extensively, touring throughout the South and Southwest. He settled in Kerrville, Tex., later moving to San Antonio as his health deteriorated.

Though the Depression cut into his record sales, Rodgers continued to record. He died of tuberculosis within days of completing a series of new sides for Victor in N.Y.

Rodgers’s recordings sold consistently after his death. Jimmie Rodgers Memorial, a retrospective album, reached the Top Ten in 1949, the same year that Tommy Duncan and His Western All Stars enjoyed a hit on the country charts with Rodgers’s “Gambling Polka Dot Blues” (music and lyrics also by Raymond Hall). Rodgers’s songs continued to provide hits for country performers in the 1950s, including Lefty Frizzell’s 1951 recording of “Travellin’ Blues” (music and lyrics also by Shelly Lee Alley) and Webb Pierce’s massively popular 1955 version of “In the Jailhouse Now” and 1956 recording of “Any Old Time.” In 1955, RCA Victor scored a Top Ten country hit with an overdubbed version of “In the Jailhouse Now No. 2” (originally recorded in 1930), credited to Jimmie Rodgers and the Rainbow Ranch Boys. The label began to reissue Rodgers’s recordings on LP with Never No Mo’ Blues in August 1956.

Notable recordings of Rodgers’s songs in the 1960s included the Fendermen’s Top Ten pop hit with “Mule Skinner Blues (Blue Yodel No. 9)” (music and lyrics also by George Vaughn) in 1960, Johnny Cash’s “In the Jailhouse Now” and Grandpa Jones’s “T for Texas” in 1962, and Merle Haggard’s tribute album, Same Train, Different Time, in 1969. Dolly Parton had a country hit with “Mule Skinner Blues” in 1970, and Tompall and His Outlaw Band charted with “T for Texas” in 1976.

Not surprisingly, Rodgers was among the first entrants to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1961. Twenty-five years later he was admitted to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, an acknowledgment of the influence he had on a broader range of popular music. That influence was further demonstrated by the 1997 release of The Songs of Jimmie Rodgers—A Tribute Album, a centennial anniversary recording supervised by Bob Dylan and featuring such disparate performers as Bono from U2, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, Van Morrison, and Jerry Garcia.

Rodgers’s complete recordings were reissued on eight compact discs by Rounder Records in 1991.

Bibliography

C. Rodgers, My Husband J. R. (San Antonio, 1935); M. Paris and C. Comber, J. The Kid: The Life of J. R. (London, 1977); C. Bond, The Recordings of J. R. (Los Angeles, 1978); R. Krishef, J. R. (1978); N. Porterfield, J. R.: The Life and Times of America’s Blue Yodeler (Urbana, Ill., 1979; rev. ed., 1992).

—William Ruhlmann