From:   "Dik de Heer"  
Date:  Sun Sep 8, 2002  2:13 am
Subject:  Born To Be With You : Jimmie Rodgers
 
JIMMIE RODGERS (By Alain Dormoy)

Born James Charles Rodgers, 8 September 1897, Meridian, Mississippi
Died 26 May 1933, New York City, New York

After winning an amateur talent contest at thirteen, Jimmie ran away
with a travelling medicine show, performing in black face. He was retrieved
by his father, a foreman in the Mobile and Ohio Railroad Company who
put him at work on the railway. For a dozen years, through WW I and
into the '20s he worked as callboy, flagman, baggage master and
brakeman. After developing tuberculosis in 1924, he left the railway
and started concentrating on his music. For several years he organised
amateur bands, toured with tent shows, played on street corners,
grabbing any opportunity he could get to perform.

In 1927 he managed to get a regular - but unpaid - spot on WWNC, a
local radio in Asheville, North Carolina. He gained an audition with the
Victor Talking Machine Company but was deserted by his band the
night before the audition. He managed to persuade the company to let
him record alone, accompanied only by his guitar. Encouraged by the
public's response to his first release "Sleep, Baby, Sleep" (coupled
with "The Soldier's Sweetheart"), Victor arranged for Rodgers to
record what would be his first big hit: "Blue Yodel" (known today as
"T For Texas"). Within months he became a national star, playing major
theatres and broadcasting regularly.

He eventually recorded 110 titles, including "Waiting For A Train",
"Daddy and Home", "In The Jailhouse Now", "Frankie and Johnny",
"Treasures Untold", "My Old Pal", "T. B. Blues", "Miss The Mississippi
and You", "Mule Skinner Blues".

Rodgers' career reached its highpoint between 1928 and 1932. By late
'32, the depression was strongly affecting record sales and theatre
attendance and his failing health made it impossible for him to do the
international tour he was planning on. On 26 May 1933, he collapsed on
the street in New York and died a few hours later of a tubercular
hemorrhage in his hotel room.

Mingling southern folk music, early jazz, Germanic yodelling and
African-American blues, Jimmie Rodgers is often referred to as "The
Father of Country Music". His influence on their careers is largely
acknowledged by generations of country artists like Lefty Frizzell,
Bill Monroe, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard and Dolly Parton.

He was the first country music artist inducted in the Country Music
Hall of Fame, in 1961 and was also inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall
of Fame in 1986.

Representative recordings: Bear Family "The Singing Brakeman" 6 CD
box.
Biography: Nolan Porterfield, Jimmie Rodgers : The Life And Times Of
America's Blue Yodeler. Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 1992.