Jimmie Rodgers: The Essential Jimmie Rodgers : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Jimmie Rodgers is known as the father of country music -- he and the Carter Family single-handedly created the market for "hillbilly" songs in the 1920s and 1930s -- but he's also one of the most charismatic pop-music personalities of all time. The good-natured magnetism of Rodgers, a former railroad man, drives every song on The Essential Jimmie Rodgers, whether the subject is trains, his dear old dad, the woman he'd like to kill -- just "to see her jump and fall" -- or even tuberculosis, the disease that troubled him in his late twenties until stopping him altogether in his midthirties.

Rodgers' music was labeled "hillbilly," but its guiding form is the blues. And his signature is the yodel, a device he turned from a Swiss yelp to something American and deeply soulful. In the great "(T for Texas) Blue Yodel No. 1" you'll hear all these elements shifting about. "Away Out on the Mountain" is bare bones, just voice and acoustic guitar, a wide-open musical space like on many of these tracks. The more complex instrumentation of "I'm Lonely and Blue" and "Blue Yodel No. 4" suggest the influence of popular jazz. Somehow, it never sounds piecemeal: He brings all the musical parts in but sends them back out, whole, under new ownership, topping them off with one of his unmistakable yodels -- the lilting, joyful call of a man in love with music.