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

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Hats off to Barry Mazor's diligence and hard work in researching this book and then writing it in such a way as to make enthralling for the casual reader as well as the scholar.

Rodgers has long been cited as a major influence in country music and as the "Father of Country Music". It has long been understood by those who cared to think about it, that Rodgers had also - directly or indirectly - influenced many artistes from other genres outside country music. How deeply the average record-buying member of the public, or even the average Rodgers collector, had really pondered the extent of this influence may well be open to challenge.

In this book Mazor opens up the reader's awareness of Rodgers' music by setting it against the political and cultural context in which it was born. He brings to life vividly the emotion and circumstances described in the lyrics that Rodgers sang, as they were at the time that he sang them.

He then illustrates the power of Rodgers' performances by analysing in fascinating - but never boring - detail, how Rodgers songs and music influenced countless performers from all genres - not just country - and not only in the 20s and 30s when Rodgers was alive, but also in the eight decades or so since his death.

Mazor will take you to places you had never considered - and can substantiate his claims, not just with heresay but with facts, interviews, photographs, etc that prove the point. By succinctly building on the cultural indicators that prevailed when Jimmie sang, Mazor reveals to the reader insights that take you through racial, gender, musical genre, economic and social considerations that illuminate the music and talent of the great man.

OK, some of the points made rest upon artistes who only ever recorded one Rodgers song; arguably such points are tenuous. But one must also consider that those artistes need not have recorded Rodgers' songs at all - so why choose his songs if they had not been touched by them in some way?

You can make up your own mind. What this book will do is make you look at Jimmie Rodgers again if you are amongst the already converted - and if you see him as a mournful white man who sang black blues - as many do - you will be forced to confront the limitations of your own perceptions! This book will make you think.

Rodgers was not the first country singer to yodel but he was the first to have such a lasting and profound influence on so many people from so many eras and so many cultures for so long. This book will help you understand why that is. A Great read!

"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," stated Phil Everly. Music writer Barry Mazor explores Rodgers' all-too-brief career and expansive influence in this beautifully detailed book. More than 75 years after his death, the legendary country blues artist remains embedded in America's musical landscape. However, the author goes further by delving into other entertainment mediums, such as the intriguing parallels between the singer-songwriter and the cinema of Buster Keaton. The introductory chapter detailing Louis Armstrong and Johnny Cash's 1970 television duet on "Blue Yodel No. 9" is a gem. Mazor also provides an exhaustive list of Rodgers-related recordings - ranging from Odetta's "Mule Skinner Blues" to Beck's "Waiting for a Train." An endlessly engaging and fascinating study.

This book has more facts and opinions about the life, music and influence of Mr. Rodgers than a passenger train can haul. The author displays a breadth of knowledge about early 20th-century American recorded music which astounds me. Unfortunately, after Jimmie dies around page 120, the fast-reading express we had hitched a ride on turns into a local, stopping at every tank town in the south and southwest and forcing us to consider the careers of seemingly scores of singers, from famous to extremely obscure. This becomes tedious after the next hundred pages, and yet there are still a hundred MORE pages of it after that. The writer makes his case, in my view, that Jimmie's brief recording career "influenced" all kinds of music, pretty much all over the world, in every decade since the '30's. In fact, the amount of information supporting the claim amounts to considerable overkill. I have simply been a casual fan of Mr. Rodgers (meaning I only owned one greatest hits album of his) and being a non-musician, there was more here than I needed. Still, Mr. Mazor can be praised for exhaustively researching Jimmie's fan base among professional singers of nearly every kind.

When listening to a particular musician or song, one tends to disregard how a song came about or what musical influence may have taken part in producing the song. This is the case with the story behind Jimmie Rodgers. Writer Barry Mazor presents a labor of love of Jimmie Rodgers's music and reintroduces the life and times of this somewhat considered obscure figure, entertainer, musician and performer to a generation who may never heard of this remarkable man. Possibly inspired by a 1970 performance of Louis Armstrong and Johnny Cash performing a Rodgers tune on the Johnny Carson show, "Blue Yodel #9," Mazor opens the history and life of Jimmie Rodgers in his book MEETING JIMMIE RODGERS: HOW AMERICA'S ORIGINAL ROOTS MUSIC HERO CHANGED THE POP SOUNDS OF A CENTURY.

Mazor provides a well-researched and documented narrative. The story begins with the Armstrong and Cash performance and delves deep into Rodgers's short-lived life, dying at the age of 35 years old after suffering from Tuberculosis, and disheartening to know, hours before his death he had been recording four new songs in a New York recording studio. One can say he passed away years before his time within the same vein as several known performers who left a lasting musical impression on proceeding generations at a young age, Hank Williams, George Gershwin, and Robert Johnson (who coincidentally played with Rodgers). But what is significant about the book is that it shows how Rodgers's music is the epitome of Americana because of its unique style that ranged from the obvious hillbilly, mountain or railroad boxcar music, which meshed with the not quite obvious, Hawaiian pop, minstrel, vaudevillian, blues, and array of other genres. But as many musicologists, critics, and musical historians have stressed, Rodgers may be considered the Father of country music and one of the fathers of rock and roll; he highly influenced a generation of musicians that crossed all boundaries, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, and a slew of British rock and roll bands that included The Kinks and The Beatles. And also obscure enough, contemporary radio listeners may hear Jimmie Rodgers's name mentioned in Alannah Myles's song "Black Velvet."

Overall, the enlightening aspect about Mazor's musical biography of the life and times of Jimmie Rodgers is the emphasis of how music leaves a lasting impression on the listener. And he does not leave musical influences unmarked within the narrative; readers will find a reference list at the end of each chapter of artists who have recorded Rodgers's songs. In addition, this is an insightful book that is engrossed with history and music and the understanding of the period in which it was made, the postwar era of the 1920s and 1930s where music played an essential part in American society at the time of the Great Depression and the Dustbowl period that would later transcend through the evolution of popular music and generations who would utilize the melodies and reinterpret the unique style of Jimmie Rodgers into their music.

Really well researched and well written music bio. Anyone interested in the roots of American music, or who just likes to read a good artist bio, will get something out of this.

This book is an in depth description of the legacy country singer Jimmie Rodgers had on the development of modern country and pop music. Rodgers, singing mostly in the 1920s and '30s, has had an outgrown, though often forgotten impact on the sound of country music. His influence among the biggest country stars after him was huge. Mazor has done a fine job of making his case. I highly recommend this book.

I have a confession to make. I have been a lifelong fan of many music genre's, especially country music and I never knew much about Jimmie Rodgers. Of course I had heard of him and knew somehow he had a big influence on much of the music I enjoy. But to say I kniew much about him would be an understatement. So it was with a good deal of anticipation that I began this book. To say the least it has been a real eye opener.

The author has written a wonderful book about the influence of Jimmie Rodgers on not only country music but virtually all other genre's including rock, jazz, blues, folk, and bluegrass. The book is as much about the various types of music Rodgers influenced as it is about Rodgers himself. The good news is both subjects are well covered and I suspect most readers will find an abundance of previously unknown material whether they are hard core Rodgers fans or just one like me that enjoys what I consider to be good music.

The book makes the case that Rodgers had a unique "shape shifting ability" to adapt to the audience whether it be portraying working people, cowboys, or ladies man and do it with emotional clarity and a narrative drama that made audience members feel he was one of them. The influence and impact of Rodgers style and music on all performers that followed him, even up to this day, cannot be overstated. It is simply amazing the number of performers, from Bob Dylan to Hank Williams,from Mike Seger to Tanya Tucker, that gave credit to Rodgers and his unique style of music and performance.

Not only does the book provide an adequate account of Rodgers life but there is also a good history of various music genre's and musicians that make for good reading. A word about the writing style of the author: He has that rare ability to write in an almost conversational manner that makes the reader feel he is having a person to person conversation with the author.

I highly recommend the book for both the general reader and the reader that tracks the history of musicians and their music. There is something for everyone here and I suspect this book will be the standard by which all that follow are measured.

When I first noticed the publisher of "Meeting Jimmie Rodgers" was Oxford University Press, I wondered what I might be in for: Schenkerian reductions of "Blue Yodel #9"? HIP-approved performance suggestions for flatpicked bass-runs using period tortoiseshell picks and flatwound strings?

But alas, there's no theory here, at least in the musical sense. Mazor's intention is to position Rodgers as a pivotal figure in American music, bridging nineteenth century minstrel, ragtime, blues, vaudeville, parlor sentimentality, and tin pan alley pop with what ultimately became bluegrass, "mainstream" country music, folk, even jazz ( a reach not convincingly made in spite of tantalizing references to Rodgers' recordings with Louis Armstrong in his studio backing band ), and ultimately "roots rock" - a term I confess I've never liked since first hearing it applied to The Smiths in the 80's. It's long since become a too-convenient moniker along the lines of "organic" and "green".

One challenge for Mazor was, I suspect, that for all the popularity Rodgers achieved in a career cut short in his thirties by tuberculosis, as with many musical icons (Bach comes to mind) Rodgers was evidently much more a doer than a talker (at least publicly) when it came to the roots of his art.

I was reminded of Charlie Christian, another hugely influential musician who was also something of a musical enigma who seemed to emerge fully formed and whose star lit the jazz sky for an even shorter period of time (and who died a similar fate as Rodgers - both of them in the New York area.)

The Singing Brakeman's bio is dispensed rather quickly and he's dead after six or seven chapters. But I'm not giving anything away here; the thrust of the book is Rodgers' vast and continued influence, not just musically, but as the prototypical musical star in our 21th Century conflated musical/visual/commercial/celebrity marketplace.

Rodgers was one of the first nationwide musical celebrities, as his early career coincided with the 20's radio/recording boom and the real birth of mass communications. The cultivated image (or images) he subsequently donned coincided with the nation's plunge from rollicking optimism to the depths of Depression.

Mazor spends a lot of time in the early chapters attempting to trace the derivations and origins of particular aspects of Rodgers work: the blue yodel, various lyrical references and narratives that Rodgers either built upon or may have come up with himself. This can be tricky history, relying on interviews with elderly performers of the day and selectively preserved recordings, but for me it's the most interesting part of the book.

What emerges is, there was a lot more to Rodgers than the Hollywood-ish Singing Brakeman image. Rodgers was a "songster" in the best sense of that term, an entertainer who moved with the currents of his time as much as he helped direct them by his genuine talents.

The later part of the book is sometimes a bit too concerned with determining Rodgers' influence based on cover recordings of his songs or the existence of what too often sound like the equivalent of Elvis impersonators. This is obviously a key part of Mazor's argument, but it tends to make the narrative somewhat dry and repetitive, is if the book were telling the history of "Jimmie Rodgers Product" as opposed to documenting his musical influence (and I do get the irony).

As a bluegrass fan, my favorite part of the later chapters dealt with the influence of Rodgers on Bill Monroe. Mazor makes interesting observations contrasting Monroe's and Rodgers approach to song narrative: For example, where Rodgers dealt effectively in ballad, storytelling form that drew his listener in, Monroe went for impressionistic images that made a very different point (and perhaps kept listeners a safe distance away.)

I found that the closer the book got to times I could personally relate to, the central argument took a little more convincing, as when Mazor describes Rick Danko's trilling at the end of "He gets to sing to just like a bird..." on Stage Fright as being somehow an updated version of Rodgers' blue yodel. Sorry, but I just don't think so and, unfortunately, Rick's no longer around to give thumbs up or down.

I also grew up during the heyday of Southern Rock, played it in bars, sold it in a record store and read about it in the "rock press". I honestly don't recall hearing the name Jimmie Rodgers much. If the guitar players in Lynyrd Skynyrd were influenced by a "Jimmie" it was more likely "Jimi". For my money, what Mazor repeatedly refers to as the "Rodgers' Guitar Style" probably owes as much to Riley Puckett and Maybelle Carter as to Jimmie's own creation.

It's one thing to say that Elvis was descendent from Jimmie Rodgers as a "roots music star". It's like saying all jazz horn players are, in some sense, descendents of Louis Armstrong. But it's quite another to imply that he or someone else would not have emerged in that role in their time had Rodgers (or Armstrong for that matter) never existed.

Mazor is a good writer, and there are enough interesting nuggets along the way in "Meeting Jimmie Rodgers" to keep the pages turning. Ultimately it comes down to
how strongly you feel about particular genres of music influence by Rodgers that will make reading worthwhile. If Johnny Cash, Ernest Tubb, Hank Snow, Lefty Frizell and other "classic" country artists are your bottle of beer, they figure prominantly in the first half of the book. If you're more interested in the folk-into-rock connections, the later chapters may appeal to you more. But Mazor is an interesting writer who sprinkles enough tidbits throughout to keep the pages turning.

This book traces the influences that Jimmie Rodgers' music has had on innumerable genres and musicians. Mazor, a writer on country music, became a fan of Jimmie Rodgers' music as a teenager. In this book, he follows his interest in Rodgers' music to the n-th degree, delving with a fine toothed comb into the stories of everyone who ever covered a Jimmie Rodgers song. At the end of each chapter are suggested listening lists, enabling interested readers to search out these covers and other songs by artists who may have been influenced by Rodgers. End material includes endnotes, an extensive bibliography, and an index.

This book is probably not an exhaustive compendium of musicians influenced by Jimmie Rodgers, but it certainly tries to be one. Along with well-known names like Willie Nelson and Hank Williams, Mazor turns up hundreds of obscure musicians and tells their stories of how they came to record a Jimmie Rodgers song. He also manages to work in the names of hundreds of others from the Beatles to Tupaq who didn't actually record Rodgers' songs, but were influenced in some way by someone who might have been influenced by Rodgers. In this sense, the book seems to go overboard, into the realm of name dropping.

Overall, I found the book rather tedious in detail and difficult to absorb. The text is so dense and long that I would frequently fall asleep while reading it and it took me months to make my way through it. I was several chapters into the book before I finally deduced the organizational structure. After a rambling preamble that gives a flavor of the book, there is an overview of Rodgers' recording career that is rather difficult to follow if you are not already familiar with Rodgers' biography--for a narrative biography of Rodgers, you will need to look elsewhere. Then there are separate chapters covering musicians influenced by Rodgers as a yodeler, as an international star, as a country musician, as a singer songwriter, as a rock and roller, etc. Each detail that Mazor presents is backed up by extensive research and interviews, but what's missing is the big picture--Mazor never really delves into how all the details add up, what Rodgers' influence on popular music really was. This is not a book for the casual Jimmie Rodgers fan or the merely curious, but with its extensive research, it may have interest for truly serious Jimmie Rodgers fans and music historians.

When most writers opine about the origins of American popular music, they focus deeply on African American music--the blues, jazz or rarely black gospel. They tend to give lip service to country music as if it made few contributions. Barry Mazor's Meeting Jimmie Rodgers moves the "father" of country music into the main stream of American popular music history by examining his roots and influences--and they are broader than one may think. This is not a biography (check out Nolan Porterfield's classic on Rodgers) but rather a study of origins and influences. Mazor examines the murky history of the "blue yodel" and demonstrates that while others yodeled before, Rodgers changed the nature of the thing by fusing various Southern sounds into his own invention. He also removed the yodel from a stage event to a deeply expressive moan. Mazor also shows Rodgers connections to the popular music of the day--his "rival" was crooner Gene Austin and he cut a record with Louis Armstrong. The great strength of Mazor's study is his demonstartion of Rodgers' deep influence-from Cajuns to western swing to the Kipsigis of Africa. Well written, engaging, and at times revealing, this book belongs on every American music lover's shelf. Right next to Nolan Porterfield's biography.