Jimmie Rodgers

At 35 years old, Jimmie Rodgers physical status not available right now. We will update Jimmie Rodgers's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Rodgers' affinity for entertaining came at an early age, and the lure of the road was irresistible to him. By age 13, he had twice organized and begun traveling shows, only to be brought home by his father. His father found Rodgers his first job working on the railroad, as a water boy. Here he was further taught to pick and strum by rail workers and hobos. As a water boy, he would have been exposed to the work chants of the African-American railroad workers, known as gandy dancers. A few years later, he became a brakeman on the New Orleans and Northeastern Railroad, a position formerly held by his oldest brother, Walter, who had been promoted to conductor on the line running between Meridian and New Orleans.

In 1924 at age 27, Rodgers was diagnosed with tuberculosis. The disease temporarily ended his railroad career, but at the same time gave him the chance to get back into the entertainment industry. He organized a traveling road show and performed across the southeastern United States until he was forced home after a cyclone destroyed his tent. He returned to railroad work as a brakeman in Miami, Florida, but eventually his illness cost him his job. He relocated to Tucson, Arizona, and was employed as a switchman by the Southern Pacific Railroad. He kept the job for less than a year, and the Rodgers family (which by then included wife Carrie and daughter Anita) settled back in Meridian in early 1927.

Rodgers decided to travel to Asheville, North Carolina, later that same year. On April 18, 1927, at 9:30 pm, Jimmie, and Otis Kuykendall performed for the first time on WWNC, Asheville's first radio station. A few months later, Rodgers recruited a group from Bristol, Tennessee, called the Tenneva Ramblers, and secured a weekly slot on the station as "The Jimmie Rodgers Entertainers".

In late July 1927, Rodgers' bandmates learned that Ralph Peer, a representative of the Victor Talking Machine Company, was coming to Bristol to hold an audition for local musicians, later to become known as the Bristol sessions. Rodgers and the group arrived in Bristol on August 3, 1927, and auditioned for Peer in an empty warehouse. Peer agreed to record them the next day. As the band discussed how they would be billed on the record, an argument ensued, the band dissolved, and Rodgers arrived at the recording session the next morning alone, or, as later stated in an on-camera interview with Claude Grant of the Tenneva Ramblers. Rodgers had taken some guitars on consignment from music shops and sold them, but never paid the stores back. The band broke up in disagreement over it. On Wednesday, August 4, Jimmie Rodgers completed his first session for Victor in Bristol. It lasted from 2:00 pm to 4:20 pm and yielded two songs: "The Soldier's Sweetheart" and "Sleep, Baby, Sleep". For the test recordings, Rodgers received $100.

The recordings were released on October 7, earning modest success. In November, Rodgers, determined more than ever to make it in entertainment, headed to New York City in an effort to arrange another session with Peer.

Rodgers requested that his sister-in-law, Elsie McWilliams, a musician, help him write some songs. She would become his most frequent "songwriting partner." She cowrote or wrote nearly 40 songs for Rodgers.

Rodgers went to the Victor studios in Camden, New Jersey and recorded four more sides, including "Blue Yodel". Better known as "T for Texas", it featured a yodel Rodgers claimed to have learned "after he caught a troupe of Swiss emissaries doing a demonstration at a church." In the next two years this recording sold nearly half a million copies, rocketing Rodgers to stardom. After this he determined when Peer and Victor would record him, and sold-out shows whenever and wherever he played.

Over the next few years, Rodgers stayed very busy. He did a movie short for Columbia Pictures, The Singing Brakeman, which today appears on the DVD and VHS compilation "Times Ain't Like They Used To Be: Early Rural & Popular Music From Rare Original Film Masters 1928–35" and on YouTube, and made various recordings across the country. He performed on a bill with humorist Will Rogers as part of a Red Cross tour across the Midwest.

On July 16, 1930, he recorded "Blue Yodel No. 9" with Louis Armstrong on trumpet and Armstrong's wife Lil on piano. A song written by Clayton McMichen and recorded as "Prohibition Has Done Me Wrong" was not issued, possibly because of copyright conflicts with Columbia, though to Juanita McMichen Lynch, Peer felt it was "too controversial for the times." The master was put aside and subsequently lost.

Rodgers' penultimate recordings were made in August 1932 in Camden, and the tuberculosis clearly was getting the better of him. He had given up touring by that time, but did have a weekly radio show in San Antonio, Texas, where he had relocated when "T for Texas" ("Blue Yodel Number 1") became a hit. It was not in Rodgers' make-up to stay still, though, and his constant touring and recording schedule only hurt his chances of recovery.

With the country in the grip of the Great Depression, the expense of making field recordings resulted in the practice quickly fading. So, in May 1933, Rodgers traveled again to New York City for a group of sessions beginning May 17. He started these recordings alone and completed four songs on the first day. When he returned to the studio after a day's rest he had to record sitting down, and soon retired to his hotel in hopes of regaining enough energy to finish the songs he had been rehearsing. The recording engineer hired two session musicians to help Rodgers when he returned a few days later. Together they recorded a few songs, including "Mississippi Delta Blues". For his last recording of the session Rodgers chose to perform alone, and as a matching bookend to his career recorded "Years Ago".

During this final recording session Rodgers was so weakened from years of fighting tuberculosis that he had a nurse accompanying him on May 24, and needed to rest on a cot between songs. Rodgers was a guest at the Taft Hotel in New York City when he died on May 26, 1933 from a pulmonary hemorrhage brought on by tuberculosis. He was 35 years old. His body was placed in a train in a pearl grey coffin and sent back to his home in Meridian, Mississippi. He was buried in Oak Grove Cemetery in Meridian.

At that time he accounted for fully 10% of RCA Victor's sales in a drastically depressed record market.

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