CD 1
1. Blue Yodel No 1 (T For Texas)
2. Soldier's Sweetheart
3. Sleep Baby Sleep
4. Ben Dewerry's Final Run
5. Brakeman's Blues (Yodeling The Blues Away)
6. Sailor's Plea
7. In The Jailhouse Now
8. Blue Yodel No 2 (My Lovin' Gal Lucille)
9. Blue Yodel No 3 (Evening Sun Yodel)
10. My Old Pal
11. My Little Old Home Down In New Orleans
12. My Little Lady
13. Lullaby Yodel
14. Never No Mo' Blues
15. Blue Yodel No 4 (California Blues)
16. Waiting For A Train
17. Any Old A Train
18. Blue Yodel No 5
19. Tuck Away My Lonesome Blues
20. Train Whistle Blues
21. Jimmie's Texas Blues
22. Frankie And Johnny
23. Blue Yodel No 6
24. Yodeling Cowboy
25. My Rough And Rowdy Ways
26. Hobo Bill's Last Ride
CD 2
1. Mississippi River Blues
2. Blue Yodel No 7 (Anniversary Blue Yodel)
3. Blue Yodel No 11
4. Pistol Packin' Papa
5. Those Gambler's Blues
6. Blue Yodel No 8 (Mule Skinner Blues)
7. Blue Yodel No 9 (Standing On The Corner)
8. TB Blues
9. Travellin' Blues
10. Jimmie The Kid
11. Wonderful City
12. Let Me Be Your Sidetrack
13. When The Cactus Is In Bloom (Round Up Time Out West)
14. Looking For A New Mama
15. My Good Gal's Gone
16. Roll Along Kentucky Moon
17. Blue Yodel No 10 (Ground Hog Rootin' In My Back Yard)
18. No Hard Times
19. Peach Pickin' Time In Georgia
20. Gambling Bar Room Blues
21. Prairie Lullaby
22. Blue Yodel No 12 (Barefoot Blues)
23. Blue Yodel No 13 (Women Made A Fool Out Of Me)
24. Mississippi Delta Blues
25. Somewhere Down Below The Mason Dixie Line
26. Years Ago (Fifteen Years Ago Today)
Jimmie Rodgers (vocal and guitar) with various accompaniments
Recorded 1927-33
With the exception of two added tracks – Lullaby Yodel in
disc one, and Prairie Lullaby in disc two – this seems to be
a straight reissue of Living Era CD AJS2011. The running order is
otherwise unchanged, as are Digby Fairweather’s notes. This being
the case, a reprise of the earlier volume applies to this selection.
I’ve not been scrupulous in fine tooth combing Rodgers’s discography
but we have here getting on for half of his commercially released
recordings; fifty sides out of one hundred plus that he bequeathed
to posterity. The number seems surprisingly small in view of his eminence
in the Country world but then TB did for Rodgers at thirty-six in
1933. And he’d only been recording for a scant six years.
It was a bit of a jolt to see that the sleeve note writer was Digby
Fairweather, the British trumpet player. But then Rodgers has always
had a place in jazz lovers’s hearts. He was certainly versed in the
blues, elements of which he picked up during his itinerant days, and
he sang adaptations of things like St James Infirmary but it
was his unlikely 1930 Los Angeles meeting with Louis Armstrong that
has endeared him to jazzers – their Blue Yodel No.9 (Standing On
The Corner) features Armstrong’s blues-drenched obbligato and
his wife Lil’s more genteel parlour piano.
Ballads, songs of the War and lost loved ones, sentimental songs
about hearth and home, kith and kin, these were some of the staples
of Rodgers repertoire. But there were also hobo ballads, and useful
elaborations on such familiar titles as Casey Jones – which
is what Ben Dewerry's Final Run is. There are lyrics that you
will have heard elsewhere – either because they were already part
of the current of popular song or because you’ll have heard Jack Teagarden
or Jelly Roll Morton sing them. Try Blue Yodel No 1 (T For Texas)
– very appropriate for the Texan Teagarden. Plenty of muddy water
and Mississippi wine.
It’s true that the rhythmic patterns are rather repetitious, and
that the characteristic Rodgers yodelling is so omnipresent as to
become stifling, but these were his stylistic prints. He absorbed
lines from the St Louis Blues in Blue Yodel No 3 (Evening
Sun Yodel). Both Those Gambler's Blues and Gambling
Bar Room Blues are in reality St James Infirmary. In fact
for one of the founding fathers of Country music it’s remarkable just
how many Blues he sang, albeit his was a very different kind to the
Classic or Country Blues. Something of his affiliations can be sensed
in the band accompaniment, essentially a jazz group line up, on a
couple of tracks.
His greatest numbers are here, all the Blue Yodels (not to be sampled
in one sitting), Waiting For A Train (unforgettably done),
and the maudlin poetics of Hobo Bill's Last Ride.
Other than that Fairweather’s notes are concise and well written,
as one would expect of a librarian-scholar, and the sound quality
is good. This is a fine selection and my only complaint is that I
wish that Nimbus hadn’t given any more publicity to Joel Whitburn’s
ridiculous "Chart positions" propounded in his book Pop
Memories 1890-1954. That’s one labour of love too crazy to take
seriously. There were no charts and it’s foolish in the extreme
to extrapolate that you can invent them.
No carping to end with though; having half Rodgers’s complete discography
on a two disc set is good enough for all but Completists.
Jonathan Woolf
CD Reviews
Nimbus RTS 4110
