In just five years as a star before his early death in 1933, Jimmie Rodgers helped define what country music would become through singing that combined storytelling clarity, physicality, and plain-talk vocal tones with musical backing that ranged from his own guitar to rural pickers, horns, and Hawaiian bands. Performing in the 1920s and early 1930s, before the term “country music” was established, he sang about day-to-day life at work and at home, tradition in a fast-changing modern world, Saturday-night pleasures, trains, outlaws, hoboes, cowpokes, loneliness, and love. He learned much about these themes in Meridian’s barber shops, pool halls, and theaters before World War One, and while working with the M and O Railroad section crews based there under the supervision of his father, Aaron Rodgers. His music was as varied and forward-looking as the railroad town itself, and while the Carter Family of Virginia represented domesticity and updated church-derived harmonies, Rodgers brought more daring themes and more aggressive musical styles. Seen as a charming outsider, a working “Singing Brakeman,” and a master showman, he became a model for later country stars by modernizing down-home singing while bringing details of Mississippi life to audiences across the United States and the world. During his recording years from 1927 to 1933, his records sold widely, and he helped invent the guitar-playing, singing songwriter who reports on his own life, even singing about his tuberculosis and looming death. Across 112 recordings, he drew from old ballads, new blues verses, and songs by other writers, and profoundly influenced hillbilly blues, honky tonk, cowboy balladry, bluegrass, rockabilly, and generations of performers; by the 1950s he had become known as the Father of Country Music.
