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  • Meeting Jimmie Rodgers: How America’s Original Roots Music Hero Changed the Pop Sounds of a Century by Barry Mazor
  • Charlie Seemann
Meeting Jimmie Rodgers: How America’s Original Roots Music Hero Changed the Pop Sounds of a Century. By Barry Mazor. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. 376, illustrations.)

Jimmie Rodgers has been the subject of a number of books, beginning with his widow Carrie Rodgers’s romanticized personal account of Rodgers’s life story in the privately published My Husband Jimmie Rodgers (San Antonio Southern Library Institute, 1935). Jimmie the Kid: The Life of Jimmie Rodgers, by Mike Paris and Chris Comber (DaCapo Press, 1977), provided the first serious look at Rodgers’s life, but the authoritative Rodgers biography is Nolan Porterfield’s Jimmie Rodgers: The Life and Times of America’s Blue Yodeler (University of Illinois Press, 1979). Many of us assumed that, with Porterfield’s masterful work, the Rodgers story had been told.

There were continuing assessments of Rodgers’s near-term impact and legacy, such as my own article “Jimmie Rodgers: Those Who Followed” (Journal of the American Academy for the Preservation of Old-Time Country Music 36:8–11, 1996), in which the immediate yodeling imitators and disciples of Rodgers were considered. These included some well-known artists such as Gene Autry, Ernest Tubb, Hank [End Page 340] Snow, and Governor Jimmie Davis, and some not so widely known, such as the Carlisle Brothers, Elton Britt, the Girls of The Golden West, and Slim Whitman. It was this legacy that led to his being proclaimed “the Father of Country Music,” but Mazor, in Meeting Jimmie Rodgers, shows us that Rodgers was much more, and how and why he was eventually inducted not only into the Country Music Hall of Fame but also the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Mazor sees Rodgers as the prototypical individual singing star, not only pioneering the way for later artists such as Hank Williams and Lefty Frizzell, but also non-country artists such as Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and even Elvis Presley. He stepped away from the then common string band and ensemble traditions to perform by himself, with his guitar, his multi-faceted “shape-shifting” persona (railroader, cowboy, rounder, ladies’ man) and charisma. Even though his brief career only lasted six years, from 1927 to his death in 1933, he was the first international superstar, the first roots and Americana artist, whose influence reached much further than just country music, into essentially every genre of American popular music. His influence even reached other countries from Australia to Africa.

In the 15 meticulously researched and well-written chapters of his book, Mazor traces Rodgers’s influence on a myriad of genres from blues to rock and roll, jazz, bluegrass, Western, commercial folk, and pop, and artists from Merle Haggard to Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia, George Harrison, the Blasters, Iggy Pop, and the Allman Brothers. Mazor quotes Phil Everly, who says: “It’s a shame, in a way, that people think of Jimmie Rodgers as the root of just one thing, when he was a root for so many things” (p. 253). As never before, the depth and breadth of the pervasive Rodgers legacy is demonstrated in a way that will leave even his most ardent fans’ heads spinning.

Meeting Jimmie Rodgers is the perfect complement to Porterfield’s Rodgers biography, extending Jimmie’s story into the twenty-first century. Anyone wanting to really understand and appreciate Jimmie Rodgers (and twentieth-century American music) should read these two books in tandem, perhaps while listening to some of the160 great recordings by a wide range of artists covering Rodgers’s songs in Bear Family’s Let Me Be Your Side Track—The Influence of Jimmy Rodgers (2008) and Bear Family’s complete compilation of all 145 of Rodger’s recordings Jimmie Rodgers: The Singing Brakeman (1992).

Charlie Seemann
Western Folklife Center
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