Jimmie Rodgers’ Old-time Country Classic, “Blue Yodel”
In his new book, Rural Rhythm, author Tony Russell tells the story of old-time country in 78 songs. In this edited extract he considers Jimmie Rodgers’ 1927 record “Blue Yodel” and the influence it had on country music.
During the fall of 1927, Victor Records’ Ralph Peer was thinking about an artist he had recently signed: a thirty-year-old singer and guitarist named Jimmie Rodgers.
A former railroader from Meridian, Mississippi, Rodgers had quit because of tuberculosis and moved to Asheville, North Carolina, for its mountain air. In August 1927, he attended a location recording session that Peer was conducting in Bristol, Tennessee–Virginia. He impressed Peer with his natural gift of a warm, communicative voice and an ingenious trick of following each verse with a yodel, the voice swerving and twisting like a lick on a Hawaiian guitar.
In 1927, what we now call country music was rooted in the past. Southern record-makers like Fiddlin’ John Carson, Riley Puckett, and Uncle Dave Macon had relied chiefly on old songs, stories people already knew. To describe this music, the record business devised phrases like “Old Time Tunes” or “Old Familiar Tunes.” But Rodgers had little interest in being old-time: he saw a different path ahead.
“Blue Yodel” was both a revelation and a revolution.
On November 30, 1927, he and Peer went to church. Not for a service: it was a Wednesday afternoon, and Trinity Baptist Church in Camden, New Jersey, now served an earthly purpose as Victor’s chief recording studio. Rodgers sang a railroad song and a Tin Pan Alley weepie, then played a brief guitar figure and launched into a new number: “T for Texas, T for Tennessee — T for Thelma, that gal that made a wreck out of me-ee. O-lay-ee-o, lay-ee-ay, lay-ee . . .” A ragbag of blues couplets about women and liquor and guns, each jaunty verse tagged with that mocking yodel.
Now white entertainers had long been appropriating African American repertoire and performance styles, from the blackface minstrels of the mid-nineteenth century to vaudeville singers like Sophie Tucker. But this was something new. Rodgers was giving white musicians an access to black country blues, an intrinsically solo, personal idiom dealing with life and its vagaries in the rural and small-town South. “Blue Yodel” was both a revelation and a revolution.
It differed from the African American model in its sound but borrowed its attitude. “I’m gonna buy me a pistol, just as long as I’m tall — I’m gonna shoot poor Thelma, just to see her jump and fall . . .” In Rodgers’s easy-going delivery, this is comic-book violence. But then he seems to become more serious. “I’d rather drink muddy water, and sleep in a hollow log, than to be in Atlanta, treated like a dirty dog.” Here we draw nearer to what many have felt to be the point of the blues: a fist shaken, angrily or impotently, at the injustice of life.
Today we have a more nuanced view of the blues, reading them less as pleas for pity or manifestos of resentment than as the original black humor: dry, sardonic two-liners. Some contemporaries saw them that way too. In New York, Abbe Niles, music reviewer for The Bookman, greeted “Blue Yodel” as “engaging, melodious and bloodthirsty.” He followed Rodgers’s career with interest, but found his attention slipping. His “singing and guitaring,” he wrote of “Blue Yodel №3,” “are as easy and lazy as ever, but [he] needs a gag-writer, for he’s running short of verses.”
Yes, “№3”: “Blue Yodel” was not just a song but a franchise, continuing until its thirteenth episode, “Jimmie Rodgers’ Last Blue Yodel,” recorded at his final session in 1933, eight days before he died.
Hillbilly blues appears as more than an extended tribute to Rodgers.
Cover versions had not been long in coming. Columbia commissioned a “Blue Yodel” from Riley Puckett, and Frank Marvin copied it for seventeen labels. Gene Autry covered several “Blue Yodel”s. Rodgers’s releases were routinely rerecorded by a cadre of copyists, while the general sound of “America’s Blue Yodeler” permeated the work of many other artists.
But in a panoramic view, hillbilly blues appears as more than an extended tribute to Rodgers. Performing the blues allowed a hillbilly musician to appropriate the black blues singer’s presentation of self. Wearing that mask, he (rarely she) became a swaggering, devil-may-care solipsist. Disguised, he could tell stories no Godfearing family man would utter outside poolhall or barbershop.
More, the blues-enabled hillbilly singer could loosen, even break free of, the bonds of narrative that defined the ballad and the nineteenth-century popular song. A blues need not tell a story or offer a moral. The point of a hillbilly blues lies less in where the wagon is heading than in who’s driving it and how they use their whip: a slideshow of images, an audacious guitar figure, a quirky yodel. The singer juggles witticisms, wry reflections, shifts of tone — for behind the mask he can speak in any voice.
When Rodgers died, every record company tried to fill his place. Throughout the ’30s, any ambitious country band had a blue yodeler. In the ’40s and ’50s, his legacy shaped Ernest Tubb, Hank Snow, Lefty Frizzell, Hank Williams.
“Blue Yodel,” or “T for Texas,” has been heard from Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, the Everly Brothers, Doc Watson, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Dwight Yoakam. Yoakam’s version was on the 1997 album The Songs of Jimmie Rodgers: A Tribute, whose other contributors, such as Bob Dylan and Van Morrison, testify to Rodgers’s stature as a country music original — a stature based upon one song. T for timeless, T for ’ternity.
Tony Russell is a music historian who has written on country music, blues, jazz, and other forms of popular music in a wide variety of publications. He is the author of Country Music Records: A Discography, 1921–1942 and Country Music Originals: The Legends and the Lost, both of which received Best Research in Recorded Country Music Awards from the Association for Recorded Sound Collections. He has been twice nominated for a Grammy award for historical liner notes, and holds Lifetime Achievement Awards from the ARSC and Belmont University. Among his other works are the pioneering Black, Whites and Blues, The Penguin Guide to Blues Recordings, and the almost twenty-year run of the journal Old Time Music, which he founded and edited.
