“Blue Yodel No. 3,” subtitled “Evening Sun Yodel,” is the third of the thirteen blue yodels Jimmie Rodgers wrote and recorded between 1927 and his death in May 1933. The series set the twelve-measure blues form, with verses that drew on the floating stock phrases of blues and folk song, against Rodgers’s yodel refrain, a flourish he called “curlicues I can make with my throat.” Rodgers, born in Meridian, Mississippi, recorded this one on 15 February 1928 at Victor’s studio in the Trinity Baptist Church in Camden, New Jersey, at the same session as “Blue Yodel No. 2” and “In the Jailhouse Now.” Victor released it on 7 September 1928 on record 21531, backed with “Never No Mo’ Blues.”
As bluegrass bands sing it, the song is a blues about a woman. The opening verse sizes her up, tall and “tailor made,” and the next lists her looks, diamond eyes and red lips; then the complaint turns, because every time he sees her she is out on the street corner, and every time he needs her she is gone, so he warns her to put her air brakes on. Each verse closes with the yodel.
Bill Monroe recorded it in Chicago, at the WBBM radio studio, on 16 September 1946, singing lead himself with Lester Flatt on guitar, Earl Scruggs on banjo, Chubby Wise on fiddle and Cedric Rainwater on bass. Columbia issued it on 14 July 1947 (Columbia 37565, backed with “Will You Be Loving Another Man”), but the label called it “Blue Yodel No. 4,” and the wrong number stuck: bands learning it from Monroe’s record often used his title, as the Dreadful Snakes did on Snakes Alive! (Rounder, 1984). Rodgers’s own “Blue Yodel No. 4” is a different song, the “California Blues.”
Other bands kept Rodgers’s number. The Country Gentlemen recorded it in June 1964 at Wynwood Music Studios in Falls Church, Virginia, with John Duffey singing lead, under the title “She’s Long, She’s Tall (Blue Yodel #3)”; that take came out in 1990 on the Copper Creek collection Nashville Jail. The Johnson Mountain Boys put it on Live at the Birchmere (Rounder, 1983), and IIIrd Tyme Out recorded it for Puttin’ New Roots Down (Rebel, 1992), with Russell Moore on guitar, Alan Bibey on mandolin, Terry Baucom on banjo, Mike Hartgrove on fiddle and Ray Deaton on bass, then again in 2011 for their Monroe tribute With Body and Soul.
