The Father of Country Music

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Jimmie Rodgers recording career was short – only six years – but it was long enough to establish country music as a national phenomenon and pave the way for generations of country artists to come.

The Singing Brakeman

Jimmie Rodgers’ plaque at the Country Music Hall of Fame says that his “name stands foremost in the country music field as the man who started it.” And indeed, there was no such thing as country music in 1927 when Jimmie Rodgers recorded his first songs for the Victor Talking Machine Company. There was “hillbilly” music, songs and tunes that were shunned by music aficionados and mostly unknown outside the hollows of Appalachia and the farmlands of the American south and west. But in that year, talent scout Ralph Peer, who also discovered the Carter family, arrived in Bristol, Tennessee, looking for new talent. Peer paid Rodgers $100 to record two of his songs: “Sleep, Baby, Sleep” and “The Soldier’s Sweetheart.” By the end of 1927, Rodgers was a success, traveling east to record and release more songs- including the first of his “Blue Yodels,” a series of “white blues” songs featuring a distinctive yodeling style that was emotional, either plaintive or happy, instead of simply an ornamental part of the song. The record sold an astonishing half a million copies, and Jimmie Rodgers was established as a star.

But before he hit it big on the radio, Jimmie Rodgers was just a Mississippi boy. Born in 1897, he lost his mother when he was seven, and from then until his early teens he was raised by an aunt who was a music teacher and who exposed him to all sorts of popular music. When he was 12, he entered and won an amateur singing contest, and, apparently hooked by his success, ran away from home twice in the following two years to perform in traveling medicine shows.

Jimmie returned to his father’s house in 1911 but kept running away. Each time, his father hauled him back; finally, he gave Jimmie an ultimatum: school or work. Jimmie chose work and settled into a job on the railroad as a water boy. Promoted to brakeman, he held the job for 15 years, but he was still hooked on singing. He taught himself to play guitar, banjo, and mandolin and often performed for his peers, earning himself the nickname “the Singing Brakeman.” He also learned the blues from the African Americans who worked with him; eventually, Rodgers incorporated that style into his own, combining hillbilly songs with the African American blues. In his spare time, he performed in tent shows and on the new medium of local radio.

“TB Blues”

It wasn’t the success of his records that ended the Singing Brakeman’s railroading career, however, but the ravaging illness of tuberculosis. Three years before he was discovered by Ralph Peer, Rodgers was diagnosed with TB. At just 27 years old, he was already on his second marriage and the father of two children. He ignored his doctor’s advice to take it easy because he needed to make a living. He continued on as a brakeman until he was finally fired for being too frail to do the work. When he was discovered by Ralph Peer in 1927, he was working at a series of odd jobs. But by 1928, he was so popular that his start power has been compared to that of Elvis Presley.

Jimmie Superstar

Over the next five years, Rodgers headlined concerts across the country, delighting audiences with songs that reflected the hard times of the Depression and the rowdy, hard-drinking boisterousness of the laboring man. He focused on the common man because, as Rodgers once said, “The underest dog is just as good as I am, and I’m just as good as the toppest dog.” He sang sentimental songs, too, about mother and home, and loss and longing. And he yodeled the blues like no one before or since. His performances of the classic “Frankie and Johnny” and the lament of “In the Jailhouse Now” became iconic country music tunes. He even starred in a short movie in 1929 titled appropriately, The Singing Brakeman. He performed with cowboy/humorist Will Rogers, newcomer Louis Armstrong, and the Carter Family. But his worsening tuberculosis dogged him every step of the way.

Loss of a Legend

At a 1933 recording session in New York City, Rodgers was so weak that he had to lie on a cot in the back room between songs, trying to regain the strength to stand at the microphone. On the eighth day, he recorded his last song, the simple and gentle “Years Ago.” Two days later, he died in a New York hotel of a pulmonary hemorrhage, a result of his tuberculosis. As he’d predicted in his 1931 song “TB Blues,” he’d lost his battle with the deadly disease. He was only 35.

In 1961, Jimmie Rodgers was among the first artists inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. He made it into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as an Early Influence in 1986 and was honored at the museum’s American Music Masters series in 1997. Rodgers inspired everyone from Hank Williams to Merle Haggard, and folk superstar Bob Dylan once called him “one of the guiding lights of the twentieth century, whose way with song has always been an inspiration to those of us who have followed the path…He was a performer of force without precedent with a sound as lonesome and mystical as it was dynamic. He gives hope to the vanquished and humility to the mighty.”