I'm told that my paternal grandfather (whom I don't remember; he died before I was two years old) was a great fan of Jimmie Rodgers, arguably the first country music solo superstar. Papaw was of that generation that owned all Rodgers's records on those plate-like old 78s. Papaw was a bit of a binge drinker, and in his cups liked to sing Rodgers's songs; he could sing them exactly like his idol.

James Charles "Jimmie" Rodgers (1897-1933) was not only the biggest selling solo artist of his time; he was also the first country singer cut down in his prime, by the most remorseless of all diseases of the time. A native of Meridian, Mississippi, he had the entertainment bug early on and by the time he was thirteen years old had already twice organized and performed in his own traveling music shows, only to be taken home by his father, a foreman on the Mobile and Ohio Railroad. Aaron Rodgers got his youngest son his first job on the railroad; Jimmie began at the very bottom, as a waterboy. There were compensations; he learned to play guitar and sing blues from black rail workers and hoboes. Eventually Jimmie worked his way up to brakeman on the New Orleans and Northeastern Railroad, a job he lost when he contracted the dread disease--tuberculosis--that would finally kill him.

At first, when he had to leave the railroad, Jimmie got back into his great love, entertainment; he had his own traveling tent show (again) until a cyclone destroyed his tent. He was forced to go back to work as a brakeman, this time in Miami, but his illness soon cost him that job. During this period he had married; he and his wife Carrie had one child, a daughter whom they named Anita. After Miami, the little family relocated to Tucson, Arizona, presumbly hoping the drier climate would help his lungs. A job as a switchman on the fabled Southern Pacific Railroad ended when his illness worsened. That time, he left the railroad for good, returning to his hometown of Meridian in 1927.

In April of that year, he began performing with a group from the Tennessee side of Bristol, Tennessee/Virginia, the Tenneva Ramblers, at radio station WWNC in Asheville, North Carolina. In July, the group traveled to Bristol after hearing that Victor Records (later RCA Victor) talent scout Ralph Peer was seeking to record new talent. The night before their session, the band had a brawl that ended in them breaking up--a very early instance of a group ending their association because of "creative differences," no doubt--and Jimmie was recorded as a solo act on August 4, 1927. He made two recordings that day: "Soldier's Sweetheart," a sentimental World War I piece, and "Sleep, Baby, Sleep." Also recorded by Peer that day was country's first supergroup, now known as the Original Carter Family--a topic for a future blog.

Rodgers's records sold moderately well, and he recorded again in November of the same year in Camden, New Jersey. That session produced the first of the famous series known as the "Blue Yodels," "Blue Yodel #1 (T for Texas)." That record sold half a million copies--a gigantic success.

Rodgers's yodels are relatively simple compared to, say, Swiss yodeling and the kind done later by Patsy Montana, Roy Rogers and others. He would sing a verse, then vocalize a series of notes and syllables that have been compared to the moaning whistle of a freight train. Rodgers himself once called them "curlicues I can make with my throat" (see the Wikipedia article "Blue Yodels"). I think he used them much as other musicians would use instrumental fills; he seldom had any accompaniment other than his own guitar.

There were thirteen in the series of "Blue Yodels"; the most famous were the aforementioned #1, #8 ("Mule Skinner Blues" released in 1931 and, after it was recorded by Bill Monroe, a standard in the bluegrass repertoire), #9 ("Standin' On the Corner", 1931, with instrumental accompaniment from Louis Armstrong and Armstrong's wife, Lillian Hardin) and "Jimmie Rodgers's Last Blue Yodel (The Women Make a Fool Out of Me"), recorded on May 18, 1933, but not released until after his death.

By 1932, it was apparent that the TB he had battled most of his adult life was finally killing him. He gave up touring and relocated to San Antonio, Texas, where he had a weekly radio show and a home he called "Blue Yodeler's Paradise." In May 1933, already dying, he went to New York City to record his last songs, completing the sessions on May 24 and dying two days later in his hotel room of a pulmonary hemorrhage.



Many of Rodgers's one hundred recorded songs were about trains and the men who worked around them, rode on them and died on them. One of his earliest was "Ben Dewberry's Final Run," about a engineer who dies in a wreck. My favorites are "Hobo Bill's Last Ride," a ballad about a hobo dying in a freight car; "Hobo's Meditation," a philosophical piece speculating about what heaven will be like for a hobo; and "Waitin' For a Train," about a hobo kicked off a train in Texas.

Rodgers greatly influenced such later singers as Hank Williams Sr., who began his sliding-note vocals because he couldn't yodel; Ernest Tubb, who could yodel until he had his tonsils out (!); and Hank Snow, who sang Rodgers's songs with a passion and precision the Singing Brakeman would have been proud of--but Snow didn't yodel, either. Bill Monroe transformed the blue yodel from its genially lazy "ah dee oh lady de ooda lay dee" to something infinitely faster; a Monroe yodel leaves most singers gasping.

Rodgers, along with Hank Williams Sr. and Williams's producer/mentor Fred Rose, was one of the three first members inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1961. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as an early influence in 1997.

Rodgers is, of all country singers, the one most associated with train songs, and his are still amazing to listen to; they are brilliantly written and performed, and preserve a way of life long gone.

Are you still awake? There are more songs to come. Till then, fair thee well.

In my life I have never lived out of hearing of a freight train whistle--possibly a good thing for a classic country music maniac. There are many, many great train songs in our tradition, many recordings predating the career of the Singing Brakeman, the legendary Jimmie Rodgers. The earliest of these are more or less folk ballads, and do not deal with the romance of the rails and hobos as do later ones.

Let's begin with the ballad of arguably the most famous engineer of them all: John Luther "Casey" Jones (1863-1900). Casey drove the #1 run for the Illinois Central RR--a train that would eventually be known as "The City of New Orleans," itself the subject of a song by Steve Goodman. The ambitious Casey Jones had moved up from a freight to a more prestigious, better-paying run as the engineer of a passenger train in February 1900. He lived just two months after that; on the foggy, rainy night of April 30 his train smashed into the back of a stalled freight just outside Vaughan, Mississippi. Casey was the only fatality. The legend says he was found in the wreckage with his hands still on the whistle cord and the brake. Within days of the wreck, the ballad "Casey Jones" was composed by an African-American friend of his, Wallace Saunders--who, as was not uncommon among the composers of folk ballads, did not profit one red cent from his song. There are countless recordings of "Casey Jones" including ones by Pete Seeger and possibly most notably The Grateful Dead.

Some ten years before Casey Jones rode his train to glory, another wreck inspired "Engine 143", also know under the alternate title "FFV." It, like the ballad about Casey Jones's wreck, is short on details of the crash and long on sentiment. The fact of this wreck is that in October 1890, a C & O Railroad train crashed near Henton, West Virginia, and engineer George Alley was killed. The ballad includes a warning from Alley's mother about not taking chances trying to "make up time"--i.e. going at excessive speeds to try to get to the destination on schedule. Alley apparently crashed into a rockslide and was killed, although he talked a lot for a dying man, about how he "want(ed) to die for the engine I love/One hundred and forty three", while his doctor laments that Alley has been "murdered on the railroad" and will be "laid in a lonesome grave." The ballad was composed by an unknown roundhouse worker from Henton not long after the crash. I have a hunch that A. P. Carter of the Original Carter Family collected the song on one of his rambles and reworked it; it was recorded by Sara and Maybelle on February 15, 1929.

Though Casey Jones may be the most famous of all engineers, the most famous of all train wreck ballads is surely "The Wreck of the Old 97", occasionally known as "The Wreck of the Southern Old 97." This Southern Railway train, driven by Joseph "Steve" Broady, was a mail run between Monroe, Virginia and Spencer, North Carolina. On September 27, 1903, Broady had been instructed to make it to Spencer on time, which meant he had to make up an hour. Near Danville, Virginia, according to the song, he "lost his air brakes" and plunged seventy-five feet off a wooden trestle; Broady and eight others, including both his firemen, were killed, Broady "scalded to death by the steam." The best known early recording of the song was made in 1924 by former light opera vocalist Vernon Dalhart, but a lawsuit over who composed the lyrics went all the way to the United States Supreme Court and was never satisfactorily resolved, although authorship was eventually assigned to a man named Charles Noell. And as the icing on the cake, Southern Railway forever tried to blacken the name of Engineer Broady by denying they had ordered him to "make up time"--he had done so on his own initiative, the company claimed. (For what it's worth, Illinois Central also concluded Casey Jones was "solely responsible" for his crash; allegedly he ignored flares and fusees that warned him to slow down approaching Vaughan.)

Corporate America never changes, huh?

Thanks for holding your yawns till the end. Next installment will be about the Father of Country Music himself, Jimmie Rodgers. Till next time, fair thee well.

WHAT AM I? A SOLDIER OF THE ENDLESS MARCH. (Edward Payne, THE SOUL OF JACK LONDON)

in silent cadence I march alongside the veterans of other battles

still bearing the wounds that killed us
we spread along roads changed since the days we died

I myself left my lifeblood on the crushed peach blossoms of Shiloh
carrying perpetually the final image
of myself lying beneath a tree
my last sensation the drift of petals dropped to earth
onto my face and hands and chest
my last sight a frightened comrade
the last sound I heard the malicious spit and burst of artillery
the last sound I made the death-sigh as I stepped into mist

and have never stepped out

once, passing the place of my dissolution
I saw a young woman beneath the tree where I died
one hand on the bark, one to her heart
rich dark hair caressing her neck as she bent her head

I dropped out of ranks and approached her
forgetting what disgust my gaping chest might inspire

she did not shrink, however
though tears dropped silver as an April moon
down the bloom of her face

"God rest him, whoever he was"
she whispered

I kissed her cheek in gratitude
cold lips savoring warmth
(I had long since forgotten the taste)
she felt only a cold touch of wind
and I left her standing, peach blossoms falling on her hair,
and returned to the endless march

**********************************************************************

Written in 1983, while I was still in college, I still think this is my best poem ever.

Enjoy.

And until next time, fair thee well.


copyright 2008 by Fairweather Lewis

Hey, Les, I promised you a postcard from my "vacation" in Hawaii--let's see if this works--

Specifically, he's my cat, a neutered tom named Blackadder, for the character made famous on British television in the 1980s by Rowan Atkinson. I chose the name because he is, like Edmund Blackadder, whiny, sneaky, snarky, and manipulative. We never call him by his full name, though; he's either the Adder or, in more affectionate moments, Booboo or Booser. He arrived here as a halfgrown refugee from my uncle's cattle barn about nine years ago. He had apparently been a house cat who fell afoul of his previous owner's obsession with a high gloss on his car's hood and was given to my uncle. Somehow he covered the half mile from my uncle's to here, we fed him, he crawled up on Mom's lap and went to sleep, and has stayed ever since. That's a record for us; our pets (mostly dogs, until Dad died) have never been longterm residents.

It's only been in the last few years, as he ages and has begun spending more time in the house and less outside, that I learned he has a lamentable defect; he cannot STAND music. The TV doesn't bother him, but he cannot stand music, either on satellite or on the CD player. And if I join in singing along with whatever source the music comes from, all hell breaks loose.

I only realized he's not a music lover after he had been here about four years. I was listening to Tim O'Brien through headphones one night when the Adder wandered into my room and hopped up onto my bed. I was sitting on the floor on a pillow; he came up behind me and pawed at the headphones till I took them off. So happened that the CD I was listening to at the time was O'Brien's 2003 TWO JOURNEYS, which has two instrumental pieces back to back. The Adder stretched out on his side and lay very still as the pieces played; I could have sworn he was listening to, analyzing and enjoying the music same as I was. The next song, though, was O'Brien's stunning duet with Karen Kasey of "The Demon Lover." The Adder leaped off the bed and fled. I don't think it was the subject matter that freaked him out. He just does not like the sound of human voices singing.

I have since learned to use that dislike to get him to go outside when he's being a pest. Doesn't matter who I'm playing--Johnny Cash, Emmylou Harris, Alison Krauss, Beethoven, Mozart, Thomas Hampson, Clannad, Taj Mahal, Ry Cooder--his detestation of the human voice covers all musical boundaries. And if, as I said, I'm so crass as to sing along, it's literally KATIE UNBAR THE DOOR. It's a miracle he hasn't bashed in his skull trying to get out.

You may wonder why a music fanatic like me would have a cat who is not musical. I can only assume that it's because A) he is awfully cute, in spite of his allergy to music and his sneaky ways, and B) having a cat who hates music is merely one of my more charming ornerinesses.

And on that ailurophiliac note, fair thee well.