April 19, 2007
The Undying Greatness of Jimmie Rodgers: An Interview with Nolan Porterfield Posted by Allen Barra at 03:35 PM EST The Undying Greatness of Jimmie Rodgers: An Interview with Nolan Porterfield The publication of Nolan Porterfield’s Jimmie Rodgers: The Life and Times of America’s Blue Yodeler, in 1979, set a high-water mark for scholarship in the field of American roots music. Since his death from tuberculosis, two days after his final recording session – Rodgers has never really gone out of style, his work constantly reinterpreted by every new generation of folk, rock, and country artists. The actor Tim Blake Nelson’s rendition of Rodgers’s popular “In The Jailhouse Now” in the Coen Brothers O Brother, Where Art Thou? signaled a new wave of interest in Rodgers’s life and work. Porterfield’s book has just been reprinted by the University of Mississippi Press, in a paperback edition with a new preface by the author. Porterfield answered the following questions from his home in Kentucky. One of the revelations of your book is the extent of Jimmie Rodgers’s popularity, a fact largely forgotten today, even to people who revere his name. How would you compare him to the most visible popular singing star of the early 1930s, Bing Crosby? I would question the assumption that Jimmie Rodgers’s popularity is “largely forgotten today.” There’s plenty of evidence that his influence remains strong, especially among the many grassroots musicians who are pursuing professional careers these days, and that would not be happening if they weren’t aware of Rodgers’s stature. They may not know all the details of his career, but they know the songs and keep on singing them. It’s difficult to make a comparison between Rodgers and Bing Crosby, first because they were different kinds of singers and appealed to different audiences, and second, when Rodgers died in 1933, Crosby was just beginning to establish his solo career. Who’s singing Bing Crosby songs these days? Record sales are not necessarily a useful measure in making comparisons, but it’s worth noting that Crosby didn’t have a million-seller until 1937, while Rodgers’s 1927 “Blue Yodel No. 1 (T for Texas)” is generally considered to have sold at least a million copies during the time it was in Victor’s catalog. (Interesting coincidence: Crosby’s first “gold record” was “Sweet Leilani,” and he was accompanied by the orchestra of Lani McIntire, who had also recorded with Rodgers back in 1930.) Jimmie Rodgers is often credited by historians with creating what came to be called country music. Yet those listening to Rodgers’s original recordings for the first time may be surprised that it doesn’t sound more “pure”—that is, I think I’m trying to say, more like folk music, like the Carter Family or similar artists of the period. Rogers’s music seems to take in so many influences—the traditional songs of Celtic origin, Mississippi Delta blues, yodeling, the Hawaiian music you mentioned, perhaps vaudeville, and God know what else. I guess what I’m groping for is that Jimmie Rodgers wasn’t a purist when it came to music—or am I lessening to Rodgers’s music the wrong way? I’m not sure just what “purist” means when it comes to Jimmie Rodgers, but you’re right that he drew from many diverse sources and in the process transformed them into something uniquely his own. As I wrote in the book, “While Rodgers and the Carters appealed to similar audiences and shared common rural origins, there were significant differences between them. . . . Putting A. P., Sara, and Maybelle together with Jimmie Rodgers was not exactly an attempt to mix oil with water (axle grease and STP might be a more fitting metaphor) but, as the results indicate, the risks were considerable. It is to everyone’s credit that their joint efforts were brought off with reasonable success, in some places even with positive verve.” If listeners today think he isn’t sufficiently “folk,” that’s their problem. I seriously doubt if either he or the Carters thought in terms of “folk music.” It was a fuzzy concept 80 years ago, and it’s even more complex and subjective today. Ultimately Jimmie Rodgers didn’t care what label you hung on him or his music, so long as he drew audiences and sold records. For whatever it’s worth, when someone says “folk music” in my presence, I find important business elsewhere. There’s a richness and diversity of influence in Rodgers’s music that I don’t hear in country artists today. It’s hard to think of any country artist today who’s open to so many styles of music. As regards the yodel, for instance, you write, “Regardless of where he got it, he made it totally and uniquely his own.” He is credited with popularizing the steel guitar, which he got from Hawaiian music, and he even recorded with Louis Armstrong, the most influential jazz musician of the twentieth century. Rodgers’s relationship with Armstrong especially intrigues me. You call their getting together “one of country music’s unfathomable mysteries.” But you also suggest that their work together was not so improbable as some other writers have led us to believe. Why? I think it’s rather obvious. They were of the same generation and both grew up in the Deep South, shaped by cultural and musical influences that were very much alike. I don’t presume to know what Rodgers’s racial attitudes were—I suspect they were much the same as those of most white Southerners in his time—but I do know that he lived and worked among blacks from an early age, identified with them, and had a natural affinity with their music. Almost from the beginning his recordings were flavored with jazz and blues; he recorded with a black jazz band as early as 1929 (an unissued take of “Frankie and Johnny”), and in 1931 he was backed by the Louisville Jug Band, and also by the St. Louis bluesman Clifford Gibson on a take of “Let Me Be Your Side Track” that didn’t surface until 1991. Ralph Peer was the catalyst that brought Rodgers and Louis Armstrong together, and I doubt if either of them thought twice about what we now view, probably erroneously, as an unusual pairing. A few years ago I had a very strange experience outside of Meridian, Mississippi. I was doing a story on Peter Tosh, the late reggae singer, for a rock magazine, and I was following his band’s bus from Houston to Birmingham. About two miles outside Meridian, the bus broke down. While Tosh and his band members were lounging on the side of the road, I mentioned to them that they were just a few minutes away from the birthplace of a country music legend. Had any of them ever heard of Jimmie Rodgers? They all got excited—“Chee-mie Ro-chers!” Tosh said. “I like his music very much!” That happened just before I read your book. It made me realize the appeal that Jimmie’s music has to transcend race, culture, and time. I don’t think any other country singer, with the possible exception of Hank Williams, has such a broad audience. What would you say is the secret of Jimmie’s appeal? Rodgers’s music is simple, basic, and delivered with an authenticity that gives it universal appeal. His songs range across the spectrum of elemental human concerns—love, work, joy, sadness, death—and he sang honestly of so many walks of life and so many hopes, fears, and dreams of ordinary men and women that almost everyone can identify with what they hear. There is another intrinsic element that really can’t be explained. Jimmie Rodgers possessed a unique combination of voice, instrument, material, and style that distinguishes every enduring musical talent. I’m convinced, along with many others, that music is generational, which means that we should have stopped listening to Jimmie Rodgers long ago. But for all these reasons, we haven’t.
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