Jimmie Rodgers Biography

James Charles "Jimmie" Rodgers (September 8, 1897 -– May 26, 1933) was the first country music superstar. Rodgers, known as The Singing Brakeman and The Blue Yodeler, was born either at his maternal grandparents' home at Pine Springs, Mississippi, just north of Meridian, Mississippi, or at his parents' home at Geiger, Alabama, USA. Nevertheless, he considered his hometown to be Meridian, Mississippi, and spent most of his early life from boyhood accompanying his father on railroad jobs. He eventually became a railroad brakeman, an extremely dangerous and highly skilled job. In the days before air brakes, the brakeman had to stop the train by running on top of the moving train from car to car setting mechanical brakes on each one.

Tuberculosis forced him to leave the railroad, and he undertook all sorts of work, ranging from police detective to blackface performer in minstrels and medicine shows. Before answering an advertisement from Ralph Peer of the Victor Talking Machine Company to audition as a performing artist. This audition in Bristol, Tennessee, on August 4, 1927 (two days after the Carter Family answered the same ad and recorded in the same hall) led to Rodgers' phenomenally successful recording career.

In 1929, as his popularity increased and his tuberculosis became worse, Jimmie and his wife moved to Kerrville, Texas seeking a drier climate. He built a $25,000 two-story brick mansion in Kerrville that he called his "Blue Yodeler's Paradise." But Kerrville was too quiet for Jimmie, and by the Fall of 1930 he had moved into a permanent suite at the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, Texas. It was there that Jimmie petitioned Blue Bonnet Masonic Lodge for membership. On that application he stated that his place of birth was Geiger, Alabama".

His songs, most of which he wrote himself, were typically either sentimental songs about home, family and sweethearts, or tough takes on the lives of hoboes, "rounders", and his beloved railroads and railroaders, on his own hard life and happy marriage.

Each of his recordings captures the unique vocal quality that singles Rodgers out from the array of early country musicians. His voice is powerful and haunting. His yodels are unexpectedly complex in tone. Despite the many other artists he inspired, his performance style is unique and immediately identifiable. His influence is heard in the entire school of honky tonk country music.

A baker's dozen of his songs bear the generic title "Blue Yodel" with a number. The first, "Blue Yodel #1" is better known from its refrain, "T for Texas, T for Tennessee". Fundamentally, Rodgers was a white blues singer, singing traditional blues lyrics and accompanying himself on guitar and yodel, which was nothing like classic Swiss yodeling. His yodeling was really vocalized falsetto blues licks, providing obbligatos and choruses that in other blues performances would have been provided by a lead instrument. His "Blue Yodels" were for the most part twelve-bar blues, but with the lyrics compressed into the first eight bars and the yodeling into the last four. Others are conventional twelve-bar blues, but with a four-bar yodel added at the end.