Rodgers, Jimmie (1897-1933)

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Rodgers, Jimmie (1897-1933)

Singer and musician Jimmie Rodgers, who rose to national fame through his recordings in the late 1920s and early 1930s, is profoundly connected to a uniquely American form of popular music—country. Since the 1950s, he has been known as the "father of country music" to musicians and fans alike, and his records have continued to sell decades after his death, solidifying a national and international following that was still alive in the 1990s. Rodgers' unique amalgamation of folk blues, popular, and hillbilly music disseminated previously marginal, regional styles to national and international audiences, and he was one of the first nationally recognized musicians to feature and popularize the guitar in his recordings.

Considered a "popular" or "hillbilly" artist in his lifetime, Rodgers was officially canonized as the "father of country music" at a memorial celebration in Meridian, Mississippi, on the twentieth anniversary of his death in 1953. With some 30,000 people in attendance, his songs were played by Hank Snow, Ernest Tubb, Webb Pierce, Bill Monroe, and Roy Acuff. In his lifetime, Rodgers' songs were covered by jazz bands and orchestras, while Gene Autry, the "singing cowboy," recorded 28 Rodgers songs between 1929 and 1937. Tribute songs were recorded after his death by Autry and by Bradley Kincaid and Dwight Butcher. They have also been recorded by the likes of Woody Guthrie, Merle Haggard, the Blasters, and Hank Snow. In 1961 Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, and Fred Rose were the first inductees into the Country Music Association Hall of Fame.

Born James Charles Rodgers in Pine Springs, Mississippi, Rodgers spent his formative years in and around the city of Meridian. Drawn to music at an early age, he won an amateur singing contest when he was 12. At 13 Rodgers went to work on the railroad, where he picked up diverse musical styles, and traded songs with hobos, roustabouts, and rounders throughout the South and Southwest. However, he contracted tuberculosis in 1923, and the resultant health problems, coinciding with a decline in available work, forced Rodgers off the railroad in 1925. Over the next two years he worked a handful of odd jobs to sustain his wife and young daughter while concentrating on music. In 1927 he auditioned and recorded for Victor in Bristol, Tennessee, in a session that was the first to capture the songs of the Carter Family, another foundational country act.

Although Rodgers was a uniquely radical figure in twentieth-century American popular music, his composition, lyrics, and life epitomize the prototypical country artist. His music featured African-American blues stylings, nasal vocals, and a Southern accent. His lyrics further emphasized his Southern roots, drawing as they did on his difficult life experiences and his travels as a brakeman on the railroad. Many of his songs used the bawdy double-entendres and sexual boasts that characterized African-American blues of the period. Rodgers was deft at rendering the sentimental ("The Mystery of Number Five") as well as the blues ("In the Jailhouse Now"), and he did so with a simplicity and sincerity that touched the working-class audiences who were his biggest fans. His creative works mirrored his life most clearly when he sang about tuberculosis in such songs as "T.B. Blues" and "Whippin' That Old T.B." Although a national star on radio and records, he preferred to play live performances throughout small towns in the South and Southwest. Rodgers rubbed elbows with his fans whenever he had a chance.

While much of his music is an adaptation of the folk blues idiom, Rodgers' work is eclectic and resists simple categorization. He recorded with artists as diverse as the Carter Family, Louis Armstrong, the Louisville Jug Band, and Lani McIntire's Hawaiians during his short, six-year recording career. Traveling with the railroad, Rodgers was likely exposed to African-American folk blues, which he incorporated into his distinct style, and his interpretations of the blues often confused listeners about his race, leading one critic to characterize him as a "White Man Gone Black." Rodgers was an early "crossover" artist who was heard and admired by African-American audiences and working-and middle-class whites alike. Unlike later white blues performers, Rodgers was respectful of the material, interpreting it, rather than imitating black singers; as music scholar Tony Russell noted in Blacks, Whites, and Blues, some African-American artists "may have even regarded him as an honorary Negro." Most of Rodgers's songs featured falsetto yodeling, which he termed "blue yodeling," a characteristic that further distinguished him from other musicians during his career, and he was known as "The Singing Brakeman" and "America's Blue Yodeler" during his lifetime.

Rodgers bridged the regional world of the nineteenth century and the modern, mass world of the twentieth. He worked in vaudeville and in blackface minstrel shows, performed on radio, recorded over 100 songs, and appeared in a movie short titled The Singing Brakeman in 1929. He played shows in conjunction with movies, headlined at the Earle Theater in Washington, D.C., toured with Will Rogers to raise money for victims of drought and the Depression, and played a plethora of small venues throughout the South. His best known songs include "Blue Yodel (T for Texas)," "T.B. Blues," "Blue Yodel No. 9" (which features Louis Armstrong), and "Blue Yodel No. 8 (Muleskinner Blues)."

Although his health was progressively failing, Rodgers signed autographs, performed in country theaters, and continued to record until his untimely death at the age of 35. He recorded his last songs just two days before his death.

—Matthew A. Killmeier