Dr jimmie rodgers biography
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Musical Significance and Early Career
Jimmie Rodgers, known professionally as the “Singing Brakeman” and “America’s Blue Yodeler,” was in the first class of inductees honored by the Country Music Hall of Fame and is widely known as “The Father of Country Music.” From many diverse elements—the traditional folk music of his southern upbringing, early jazz, stage-show yodeling, the work chants of Black railroad section crews and, most importantly, African American blues—he forged a lasting musical style that made him immensely popular during his own lifetime and a major influence on generations of country artists to come. Gene Autry, Johnny Cash, Lefty Frizzell, Merle Haggard, Bill Monroe, Dolly Parton, Hank Snow, Ernest Tubb, and Tanya Tucker are only some of the dozens of stars who have acknowledged Rodgers’s impact on their music.
James Charles Rodgers was the son of a railroad section foreman but was attracted to show business. At
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Rodgers, Jimmie
Jimmie Rodgers (1897-1933), known as "The Mississippi Blue Yodeler" and "The Singing Brakeman,"was the first nationally-known country music star. He influenced many later performers from Hank Snow and Ernest Tubb to Lefty Frizzell and Merle Haggard. Rodgers was the first musician to be inducted into the Country Music ingångsrum of Fame.
Born in Meridian, Mississippi, on September 8, 1897, Rodgers grew up in hard times. He was the third son of förnamn Rodgers, a maintenance-of-way railroad foreman for the Mobile & Ohio Railroad. His mother died when he was kvartet and Rodgers went to live with his mother's sister, a former teacher who had degrees in music and English. She introduced him to many kinds of music, including vaudeville, pop, and dance hall ditties. He was a wild boy and, when he returned to his father in 1912, he hung out in pool halls and seedy bars, though never got into serious trouble.
At the age of 12, he sang "Steamboat Bill" at a talent contest and
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“Folks everywhere knew about Jimmie Rodgers, and although some of them were reluctant at first to believe that he was really there in person, playing their own town, they soon learned that he was as much at home in Sweetwater or O’Donnell as in front of a Victor microphone or on the stage of some fancy big-city theater. Vernon Dalhart and Gene Austin might make a lot of records, but they didn’t come out into the boondocks to rub shoulders and tell bawdy jokes and laugh with the plain folks who bought them. The effects of the Blue Yodeler’s tours had been apparent for some time. Just when the first baby was named after Jimmie Rodgers isn’t known, but there would be many to follow; and everyone had a personal story to tell about him what Jimmie had said the time he played Wetumpka or Conroe, how he’d given his guitar to a blind newsboy in McAlester, the way he sang his way out of jail after killing his girlfriend, the time he invented the yodel, ran