RODGERS, JAMES CHARLES (1897–1933). James Charles Rodgers, the "father of modern country music," was born on September 8, 1897, at Meridian, Mississippi. He was the son of Aaron W. and Eliza (Bozeman) Rodgers. His father was a railroad gang foreman, and Jimmie, whose mother died when he was four years old, grew up on the railroad. He started work as a water carrier at the age of fourteen and eventually became a brakeman. Working on railroads throughout the South, he learned songs from black railroad workers, who also taught him to play the banjo and the guitar. He was married to Carrie Cecil Williamson on April 7, 1920, and they had two daughters, one of whom died in infancy.
A severe case of tuberculosis, contracted in 1924, forced Rodgers to retire from the railroad, after which he went through a chain of odd jobs and migrations in the South and Southwest. He served a brief stint as an entertainer with a medicine show and for a while was a city detective in Asheville, North Carolina, where he had moved in search of a more healthful climate. He organized the Jimmie Rodgers Entertainers in Asheville, and the group performed on the local radio station, singing both popular and country music.
In 1927 Rodgers signed a contract with the Victor Talking Machine Company, and his records catapulted him to almost immediate fame. He made his first recording on August 4, 1927, in Bristol, on the Tennessee–Virginia border, recording "Sleep, Baby Sleep" and "Soldier's Sweetheart."
Rodgers introduced a new form to commercial hillbilly music, the blue yodel, heard best in the "Blue Yodel" series of twelve songs—"Blue Yodel No. 1," "Blue Yodel No. 2," etc. One of this series has remained one of the most popular of his songs and has become known as "T for Texas." Rodgers recorded 111 songs altogether and sold twenty million records between 1927 and 1933. He earned as much as $100,000 annually, but medical bills took most of it. Billed during his professional career as "America's Blue Yodeler" and the "Singing Brakeman," Rodgers, although unable to read music, enthralled radio, recording, and stage audiences with his performance of songs that seemed to catalogue the varied memories and experiences of small-town and rural Americans. His records included such songs as "The One Rose," "The TB Blues," "In the Jailhouse Now," "Any Old Time," "Carolina Sunshine Girl," and "The Yodeling Ranger" (composed shortly after Rodgers was made an honorary Texas Ranger in Austin in 1931). Rodgers's guitar technique and his famous blue yodel, as well as the informality of his presentation, were emulated by scores of young country singers—Jimmie Davis, Hank Snow, Gene Autry, Ernest Tubb, Hank Williams, Kenneth Threadgillqv, and others—whose success was a tribute to the country singing star.
To seek relief from tuberculosis, Rodgers moved to the dry region of the Texas Hill Country and restricted himself to performances in the South and Southwest. During the last few years of his life he made most of his appearances in Texas. In 1929 he built a $50,000 mansion, Blue Yodeler's Paradise, in Kerrville, but left there to live in a modest home in San Antonio in 1932. He died on May 26, 1933, in a hotel room in New York City while on a recording trip there. He was buried in Oak Grove Cemetery at Meridian, Mississippi. Jimmie Rodgers was the first person named, by unanimous vote, to the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, Tennessee. He received this posthumous honor on November 3, 1961, less than a month before the death of his wife in San Antonio.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Austin American, July 29, August 5, 1972. Bill C. Malone, Country Music U.S.A. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968). Carrie Williamson Rodgers, My Husband Jimmie Rodgers (Nashville: Ernest Tubb, 1935; rpt., 1953). Jimmie Rodgers (http://www.jimmierodgers.com/), accessed November 10, 2008.
