Jerry,

My record company… is doing a Jimmie Rodgers tribute record — you don’t have to yodel (there’s plenty of songs where he doesn’t yodel) but if you want to yodel, that’s ok too… Anyway if it’s not too much to ask, think about a Jimmie song — let me know something in some kind of incalculated amount of time…

All the best,

Bob

The Bob here was Dylan; the Jerry was Garcia. Dylan scratched out the letter on a Beverly Hills entertainment manager’s stationery. When he finished the album in 1997, he called it The Songs of Jimmie Rodgers — A Tribute. Bono was on it. So were Van Morrison, Willie Nelson, and Aaron Neville. John Mellencamp did a song. Jerry Garcia, undaunted, yodeled through “Standin’ on the Corner,” better known as “Blue Yodel No. 9.”

Way before Dylan, Gene Autry covered Jimmie Rodgers. Harry Belafonte did, too. Lynyrd Skynyrd. Hank Snow, Ernest Tubb, Lefty Frizzell, Johnny Cash. Merle Haggard released an entire album of Jimmie Rodgers songs. Dolly Parton’s cover of “Muleskinner Blues” made her a superstar and redefined what it meant to be a woman in country music.

©2010 Endeavors magazine.

Jimmie Rodgers. Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Click to read photo caption. ©2010 Endeavors magazine.

Rodgers, long dead by the time these stars picked his songs, was tubercular, sickly but swaggering, a traveling medicine-show runaway and sometime railroad worker who, by most accounts, failed at pretty much everything he set out to do. In the 1920s he hopped from one train job to another, shuffling around between tracks and towns until the TB made him too weak. He wanted to be a singing star, but he couldn’t read music, could barely keep time, and, the night before he was supposed to record for big-city talent scout Ralph Peer, argued with his band and then broke up the group.

He showed up to the Peer session alone. “All right, George,” he said. (Rodgers called everyone George.) “I’ll just sing one by myself.” He’d told Peer he had dozens of songs, but he could only muster two: one maudlin nineteenth-century ballad and another old vaudeville tune that Rodgers biographer Nolan Porterfield calls “a much-worked-over moldy fig.” Neither became much of a hit.

A few months later, in late 1927, he traveled to New York and checked himself into a posh hotel (telling the clerk to bill it to Peer’s record company). He called Peer and somehow talked him into another recording session. But something about Rodgers had changed. His guitar was now driving and lively; his voice was confident and infectious. In early 1928 — back when selling a hundred thousand records could make you a star — Peer released “Blue Yodel.” It sold more than a million. Rodgers lived only five more years before the TB did him in, but he recorded often and sold out shows wherever he went. Many people now consider his songs country music’s headwaters.

Why does Rodgers’ music still resound? Will the Singing Brakeman’s songs live forever, despite his yodeling, despite his adenoidal voice, and despite the way his seventy-five-year-old recordings wheeze and hiss and pop?

Today, first-time Jimmie Rodgers listeners tend to really like or really dislike what they’re hearing, Jocelyn Neal says. There’s not much middle ground. And often, Neal says, people have two reactions to Rodgers: they say that the song they’re hearing sounds familiar, and they seem compelled to add that it either is or isn’t real country music. Neal has wondered about those reactions for a long time. She studies country music and American popular music, and in her new book, The Songs of Jimmie Rodgers, she traces the lineage of some of Rodgers’ most well-known tunes and takes a careful look at his history and legacy to explain why so many of us still relate to his music.

Rodgers was a generalist, an opportunist, working at a time when the term “country music” didn’t exist. His songs became the core of country, Neal says, simply because so many generations of musicians and fans that came after Rodgers decided to define them that way. Decades after Rodgers died, Neal says, “Johnny Cash walked out on stage and used just a brakeman’s hat and a train lantern as a way of summoning the father of country music from beyond the grave.” Rodgers’ songs tend to resurface at pivotal moments in the history of country: when Elvis brought rock ‘n’ roll to the suburbs, when Dolly Parton declared that she wouldn’t be a demure female sidekick, when Urban Cowboy brought crossover pop to Nashville, and when O Brother Where Art Thou? turned a generation of late-twentieth-century fans on to the old stuff.

How to yodel, in one easy lesson

“Technically a yodel is the rapid and repeated transition in vocal technique from chest voice to head voice or ‘whistle’ voice or, more specifically, a shift from using the thyroartenoid muscles to using the cicothyroid muscles, with abrupt glottal stops and a noticeable change in timbre accentuating the difference between the upper and lower tones.” — The Songs of Jimmie Rodgers, Jocelyn Neal

Neal explains that Rodgers had a knack for understanding his audience. He adapted his yodel from vaudeville, cadged some lyrics and melodies from black bluesmen, and even reworked sentimental old pop songs that people knew well. He carefully managed his image, dressing in railroad duds, or a cowboy getup, or a slick suit and tie. “From the time he was a young teenager,” Neal says, “Rodgers knew that his job as an entertainer was to give the audience what they wanted, whatever that may be.” He intuitively grasped the music business in a way that many of his contemporaries couldn’t: he understood that songs were commercial commodities, and Peer used those songs in a business scheme to maximize profits from rights and royalties.

More than anything, Rodgers’ songs endure because of what Neal calls their “irreconcilable dualities.” They’re built with borrowed phrases and techniques, yet they seem autobiographical. They’re a reference to country music’s idealized past, but from the get-go they’ve been a heavily promoted, moneymaking enterprise. “They’re the essence of traditional country music, yet they’re simultaneously claimed as pop, folk, and rock,” Neal says. When Bob Dylan picked up a Jimmie Rodgers song, he instantly aligned himself with Southern, rural, working-class American roots; he evoked an idyllic, mythological past; and he reshaped his own public image, if only slightly, by borrowing the image that Rodgers had created for himself eighty-some years earlier. And he had no trouble convincing a whole CD’s worth of stars to do the same. That’s as good a measure as any for the power of a Rodgers song. Not bad for a run-down railroad drifter who could never do anything right.