"Blue Yodel No. 1 (T for Texas)" - The Beginning of a Country Legend

Part 1 (of 5) of a recently re-discovered document that I wrote for an independent study with Dr. John Kimsey while I was at DePaul University in 2008. Works cited available upon request.

The influence of Jimmie Rodgers on American music cannot be understated.  He has been called the “father of modern country music” and he has influenced everyone from Hank Williams and Merle Haggard to Lynyrd Skynyrd.  While he only recorded 111 songs in his career, they left a lasting impression.  He has been credited with introducing, “new techniques and styles to the music and inspired a legion of followers who sought to emulate their master”, most directly, Hank Snow (Malone 77).  All types of music influenced his style, most notably Tin Pan Alley, jazz, blues and hillbilly music; and many of these styles can be found within any given song (Malone 77). 

“Blue Yodel No. 1 (T for Texas)” was the first of thirteen songs in the “Blue Yodel” series.  These songs often had other names, such as “T for Texas,” but due to the popularity of this song, Ralph Peer chose to rename songs with the yodel to “Blue Yodel” to sell more records (Peer 139).  All of these songs shared some commonalities such as the yodel in the refrain, a lyric and song structure based off of 12-bar blues, and lyrical themes that also mirror the blues. For example, often involving having been “done wrong” by a woman, but instead of being sad, decides to get angry or even.  This song would go on to catapult Jimmie Rodgers into pop stardom, unofficially selling over 1 million records (no official data was kept during those years) and influence country legends to come for many years (Lilly 62, Malone 84).

Jimmie’s exposure to the blues is well documented.  Growing up in Mississippi in the years the blues were forming as a musical style, he would have found the blues hard to avoid.  Add to this that he worked with black construction crews and on the railroads, during which time he would have learned black work songs and other forms of black music.  It is impossible to know how many of these work songs ended up influencing his lyrical content in later years.  He was also an avid record buyer and he would have easily come across “race records” of the Deep South in Mississippi (Malone 87).  According to Bill C. Malone, author of Country Music, U.S.A., “one thing is certain, he did much to inspire an interest in the blues in at least a generation of country musicians” (87).

The origins of the “Blue Yodel” style can most likely be found in Jimmie’s childhood as he rode the trains with his father and then later as he worked on the trains himself.  It would be on the trains in Mississippi where he would learn the blues from the black train workers and yodel to mimic the sound of the train whistle (Malone 79).  The song structure “resembled the typical blues form, but at the conclusion of the third line, Rodgers lifted his voice to a higher octave and uttered the blue yodel” (Malone 81). 

The blues form used in “Blue Yodel No. 1” is the most basic of blues styles: the 12-bar blues.  A basic 12-bar blues is performed in 4/4 time, using the I, IV, and V chords.  Each bar is a measure of four beats and each chord has a constant position in the progression:

| I | I | I | I | IV | IV | I | I | V | IV | I | V |

This chord progression complements the common blues lyrical format very well and Jimmie Rodgers used this to perfection in “Blue Yodel No. 1”.  He used the AAB lyrical pattern as shown here:

I'm gonna buy me a shotgun with a great long shiny barrel
I'm gonna buy me a shotgun with a great long shiny barrel
I'm gonna shoot that rounder that stole my gal.

As in this example, the first two lines are a statement and the third is usually a response or a statement that completes the thought of the first two lines, sometimes “with a twist” (PBS.com).

In addition to introducing many country fans and artists to the blues, Jimmie Rodgers also introduced the yodel to the country audience.  Artists such as Hank Williams, Gene Autry and The Band have since emulated the yodel.  It could be argued that all country musicians who yodel could trace that trait back to Jimmie Rodgers (with the possible exception of Jewel, who just released her first country album, and comes from a Swiss-German family, who use another tradition of yodeling). 

So what is yodeling?  According to Bart Plantenga, author of Will There Be Yodeling in Heaven?:

Ethnomusicologists say the yodel is an ancient rural form of calling which uses sudden alterations of vocal register from a low-pitched chest voice to high falsetto tones sung on vowel sounds -- Ah, OH, OO for the chest notes, AY EE for the falsetto -- nonlexical syllables -- a primitive form of scat singing, if you will. Yodels create distinct breaks at the moment of transition between these two registers, giving yodels their character (WFMU.org).

Plantenga goes on to describe how in the foothills of Appalachia, German immigrants passed this style onto their Scots-Irish neighbors and thus the yodel was introduced to ‘hillbilly’ music (WFMU.org).  It is very unlikely that Jimmie Rodgers was the first hillbilly yodeler; however, due to his recording career being at the beginning of the recording industry and his immense popularity, he is sometime single-handedly credited with introducing the yodel to country music.

Jimmie Rodgers may have not been the first blues singer, or the first hillbilly yodeler, but he was a trailblazer in popular music.  He was the first to popularize a form of music that combined black and white styles into a new style.  He would also go onto influence both black and white performers with his hybrid style.  While many modern artists may not know the music of a man who died more than 70 years ago, odds are they can trace their musical lineage back to Jimmie Rodgers.