Jimmie Rodgers

James Charles Rodgers was born in Meridian on 8 September 1897, the son of a section foreman on the Mobile and Ohio Railroad. At thirteen he won an amateur contest at a Meridian theater and ran off with a traveling medicine show; his father brought him home and put him to work on the railroad. From the First World War into the early 1920s he worked the lines from Mississippi to Texas, on the Mobile and Ohio, the New Orleans and Northeastern and other roads, as a call boy, flagman, baggage master and brakeman, all the while working on his music. The Black work crews he started with, as a water boy, taught him their work songs and some banjo, and the blues of African American musicians became the strongest of the elements in his style, alongside traditional Southern music, early jazz and stage yodeling.

After he developed tuberculosis in 1924 he gave up railroading and turned to music, playing on street corners, organizing amateur bands and touring with tent shows. In 1927, in Asheville, North Carolina, he got an unpaid spot on the radio station WWNC and persuaded the Tenneva Ramblers, a string band from Bristol, to play with him as the Jimmie Rodgers Entertainers. When the program was canceled they found work at a resort in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where they heard that Ralph Peer of the Victor Talking Machine Company was recording in Bristol. They drove there and won an audition, but the band quarreled with Rodgers over billing and left, and on 4 August 1927, at 410 State Street, Peer recorded him alone with his guitar on “The Soldier’s Sweetheart” and “Sleep, Baby, Sleep.” The Carter Family made their first records at the same Bristol sessions.

That first record sold well enough for Peer to bring him to Victor’s studio in Camden, New Jersey, on 30 November 1927, where he recorded “Blue Yodel (T for Texas),” his first big hit; renamed “Blue Yodel No. 1” once the sequels began, it sold more than a million copies in his lifetime. Within months he was playing first-run theaters, broadcasting regularly from Washington, D.C., and touring the South on the Loew’s vaudeville circuit. At Camden in February 1928 he recorded “The Brakeman’s Blues” as one of the Three Southerners and “In the Jailhouse Now” with Ellsworth Cozzens on banjo, and in Atlanta on 22 October 1928 he cut “Waiting for a Train” with a small band of guitar, steel guitar, bass, cornet and clarinet; with “Blue Yodel No. 4 (California Blues)” on the other side, it became his second-best seller.

Over the next five years he recorded in New York, Camden, Atlanta, Dallas, New Orleans, Hollywood and Louisville. Twelve sequels to “Blue Yodel” were the records he was best known for, many of them written with his sister-in-law Elsie McWilliams, who helped him with much of his material. In 1929 Columbia Pictures filmed him in a short, The Singing Brakeman, and he built a house he called Blue Yodeler’s Paradise in Kerrville, Texas. At the Hollywood Recording Studios in July 1930 he recorded “Blue Yodel No. 8 (Mule Skinner Blues)” on the 11th and, on the 16th, “Blue Yodel No. 9 (Standing on the Corner)” with Louis Armstrong on cornet and Lil Armstrong on piano. In Louisville in June 1931 he recorded with the Carter Family and with the St. Louis blues musician Clifford Gibson, and he also recorded with the Louisville group the Dixieland Jug Blowers. In 1931 he toured with Will Rogers, and his later sessions brought in Bill Boyd in Dallas in February 1932 and, at Camden that August, Clayton McMichen on fiddle, with Slim Bryant on guitar and Oddie McWinders on banjo, for “No Hard Times.”

His career peaked between 1928 and 1932. By late 1932 the Depression had cut into record sales and theater audiences, and his health ruled out the films and international tours he had planned. In May 1933 he went to New York to finish his Victor contract and recorded between 17 and 24 May, resting between takes. Two days after the last session, on 26 May 1933, he died at the Hotel Taft.

Gene Autry, Johnny Cash, Lefty Frizzell, Merle Haggard, Bill Monroe, Dolly Parton, Hank Snow, Ernest Tubb and Tanya Tucker are among the artists who have acknowledged his influence. WSM hired Monroe for the Grand Ole Opry in October 1939 on the strength of his version of “Mule Skinner Blues,” and Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys recorded it for Bluebird in Atlanta on 7 October 1940, with Clyde Moody, Tommy Magness and Cousin Wilbur. Frizzell sang at the first Jimmie Rodgers Memorial Festival in Meridian in 1953.

• 1961: Country Music Hall of Fame, in its first class of inductees
• 1970: Songwriters Hall of Fame and Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame
• 1985: Grammy Hall of Fame, “Blue Yodel (T for Texas)” (Victor, 1928)
• 1986: Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, as an early influence
• 2007: Grammy Hall of Fame, “Blue Yodel No. 9 (Standing on the Corner)” and “In the Jailhouse Now”