Meeting Jimmie Rodgers How America's Original Roots Music Hero Changed the Pop Sounds of a Century

In the nearly eight decades since his death at age thirty-five, singer-songwriter Jimmie Rodgers has been an inspiration for numerous top performers--from Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, and Hank Williams to Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, and Beck. How did this Mississippi-born vaudevillian, a former railroad worker who performed so briefly so long ago, come to be the model for how American roots music stars could become popular heroes? In Meeting Jimmie Rodgers, the first book to explore the legacy of "The Singing Brakeman" from a twenty-first century perspective, Barry Mazor offers a lively look at Rodgers' career, tracing his rise from working-class obscurity to the pinnacle of renown that came with such hits as "Blue Yodel" and "In the Jailhouse Now." As Mazor shows, Rodgers brought emotional clarity and a unique sense of narrative drama to every song he performed, whether tough or sentimental, comic or sad. But more than anything else, Mazor suggests, it was Rodgers' shape-shifting ability to assume many public personas that connected him to such a broad public and set the stage for the stars who followed him.

Barry Mazor has been writing about American music since the 1970s. A long-time senior editor for the roots and pop music magazine No Depression, he writes frequently on country and pop music for The Wall Street Journal.

Table of Contents
Introduction: Meeting Jimmie Rodgers HalfWay
1. The Man Who Walked Into Southern Show Business
2. Close to the Ground: The Singing Brakeman
3. America's Blue Yodeler No. 1: This White Guy Sings Blues, Too
4. America's Blue Yodeler No. 2: Instigator of Blue Yodelmania
5. International Multimedia Star
6. Doomed Singer-Songwriter with Guitar
7. Aftermath: The Late, Great Jimmie Rodgers
8. South by Southwest: An Easterner in a Cowboy Hat
9. Back East: The Hillbilly Echo, 1933-1947
10. Some Sort of Folksinger?
11. The Father of Country Music
12. Rough and Rowdy Ways: To the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
13. Sentiments in Context: The Return of Vaudeville Jimmie
14. High-Powered Mamas: Women & the Music of Jimmie
15. Down the Old Road to Home
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Credits
Index