“Brakeman’s Blues” — titled in full “The Brakeman’s Blues (Yodeling the Blues Away)” — was written and recorded by Jimmie Rodgers in 1928. Rodgers had himself worked as a railroad brakeman, and the stage name that followed him, the Singing Brakeman, fit a song like this exactly.
The lyric is loose and bluesy, threaded with the yodel that was Rodgers’s signature, its narrator drifting through the easy fatalism of railroad life. Like much of Rodgers’s work, it blends country sentiment with the phrasing of the blues.
Bill Monroe recorded “Brakeman’s Blues” in 1951, one of several Rodgers songs he kept in his repertoire across his career. Monroe had grown up on Rodgers’s records, and carrying them into bluegrass was a way of honoring a direct musical ancestor.
