Jimmie Rodgers - Biography
By J Poet
Jimmie Rodgers single handedly made country music big business by selling millions of records (78 RPM singles.) Like AP Carter, he arranged and adapted traditional folk, blues and vaudeville songs, making them his own, but he was also a gifted composer and created a bedrock repertoire that other country singers have drawn on ever since. His singing was raw and powerful and his forceful guitar playing alternating between short, brilliant fills and thumping blues based rhythms. He synthesized white and black music - folk country and jazz – into the style we now call country music. He was also a sharp businessman, fiercely making sure he collected the royalties he was owed. He recorded for seven brief years turning out hundreds of records and never cut a bad performance. He usually played with just his guitar and voice, but he was an adventurous musician and played with black jazzmen (including a young Louis Armstrong), string bands, jug bands, the Carter Family, Hawaiian bands and full orchestras. He contracted tuberculosis when he was 27 and succumbed to it the day after his last recording session. He was 36 years old.
Jimmie Rodgers was born on September 8, 1897 in Meridian, Mississippi, the youngest of three boys. His mother died during childbirth when he was young and he lived with various relatives until his father, Aaron, who worked on the railroad, remarried. He moved in with his father and stepmother in Meridian, but his high spirits caused problems. His father brought him to work in the railroad yards with him where he learned to play guitar and banjo from the African American railroad workers. He didn’t want to go to school; he hung out in pool halls and bars and frequently ran away from home to join the traveling shows that roamed the south. His father brought him home many times, but he was soon organizing his own performing troupes where he sang and played guitar, banjo and mandolin. Exasperated, Aaron Rodgers got his son a job on the railroad, first as a water boy, then as a brakeman. When he was 27 he got TB and quit the railroad, and starting touring in traveling shows, but money was scarce.
In 1927 he moved with his new wife Carrie and their daughter to Asheville, North Carolina, which had a large music scene and a new radio station WWNC. Within a few months Rodgers found a band to back him - The Tenneva Ramblers - and was performing on a weekly show calling the group The Jimmy Rodgers Entertainers. Days he worked as a janitor and cab driver. In July, Rodgers heard that Ralph Peer, A&R man for the Victor Talking Machine Company, was auditioning musicians in Bristol, Tennessee. Rodgers and the band went to Bristol and got booked for a session, but a fight about who was going to get top billing led the band to quit. Rodgers cut two songs: “Sleep, Baby, Sleep” and “The Soldier's Sweetheart.” He was paid 100 dollars and promised some royalties. (Peer also recorded the Carter Family that week.) When the records came out they were fairly successful so Rodgers went to New York City to make more records and ask Peer for an account of the money he was owed. His first Victor session in New Jersey yielded “Ben Dewberry's Final Run”, “Mother Was A Lady” and two originals “Away Out on the Mountain” and “T for Texas” which was released as “Blue Yodel #2”. The single of “Away Out on the Mountain” sold half a million copies. Rodgers was a star, selling out concert halls all over the country. He moved to Washington DC and got another weekly radio show on WTFF billed as The Singing Brakeman. He had enough clout to tell Peer and RCA when and where he’d record.
In 1929 he made a short movie, what would be called a video today, for three songs “Waiting for a Train,” “Daddy and Home” and “T for Texas” his biggest hit at the time. He toured with Will Rogers and cut “Blue Yodel #9 – Standin’ on the Corner,” with Louis Armstrong on trumpet and Lillian Armstrong on piano. He built a large home in Kerrville, TX and had a weekly radio show in San Antone, but his lung problems were slowing him down. The Great Depression and stock market crash of late 1929 also led to a decrease in concert bookings and record sales. In May of 1933 he had his last sessions, and had to record sitting down, too tired to stand. He died 36 hours after cutting his last record “Years Ago.”
Everything Rodgers ever recorded commercially is available on the excellent seven CD set from Rounder, all available as single CDs: First Sessions (1991 Rounder), The Early Years 1928-1929 (1991 Rounder), On the Way Up 1929 (1991 Rounder), Riding High 1929-1930 (1991 Rounder), Down the Old Road 1931-32 (1991 Rounder), America's Blue Yodeler 1930-31 (1991 Rounder), No Hard Times 1932 (1991 Rounder), and Last Sessions 1933 (1991 Rounder). For all the bells and whistles pick up The Singing Brakeman (1992 Bear Family six CD box) will all Rodgers work and a few outtakes, on six CDs with a scholarly bio and complete discography. Rodgers was the first artist inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. In 1970 he was elected to the Songwriters Hall of fame, in 1978 he USPS put him on a postage stamp and in 1986 he was inducted to Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a Founding Father.