[Granville-Hough] 4 Jul 2009 - Jimmie Rodgers

[Trustees for Granville W. Hough]

Date: Sat, 04 Jul 2009 08:00:46 -0700
From: Granville W Hough <gwhough at oakapple.net>
Subject: Jimmie Rodgers, early blues guitarist and singer - 4 Jul 2009

Happy Fourth to All!
I received this nice message from friend Harold Hopkins, and it brought
back all kinds of long forgotten or suppressed memories.  I hope you can
see the YouTube images and hear the melodies.  It is about as authentic
as one can get about the Great Depression days.
	One can ask anyone born between 1920 and 1925 what kind of music we
heard, and those of us from the South will say we heard church music and
we heard Jimmie Rodgers by Victrola.  Radio came after Jimmie Rodgers.
Many elderly people may today retain their accent because they learned
to sing Jimmie Rodgers songs.
	There is a thing we might call the Michael Jackson phenomenon, but I
know not a single one of his songs.  Maybe the very young will remember
him just as I remember Jimmie.  If you have never seen or heard Jimmie
Rodgers, I urge you to take advantage of this opportunity.

 ===

Greetings, friends:

I first heard Jimmie Rodgers on phonograph records in the late 1920s
when I was about six or seven  years old. My father owned a movie
theatre at Mize, MIssissippi,  and used to turn the lights on and play
a hand-wound phonograph with popular records of Jimmie Rodgers and
others to entertain audiences while the (silent) movie reels were
being changed on the projector -- seven reels to a feature movie. Mize
is a town of about 400 people where I was born and raised.  Jimmie
became very poplar throughout much of the country and was  known as
"Mississippi's Blue Yodeler."  I have his entire recorded output in a
package of CDs .  Jimmie died in 1933 (of tuberculosis) but his
playing and singing were so popular that the record company kept him
recording in a New Jersey studio even when he was virtually on his
deathbed -- and I guess he either needed the money or enjoyed the
popularity.  During these final sessions he would lie in bed with
fever and they'd get him up and into the studio to  record and then
take him back to bed. There is a  monument to Jimmie in a cemetery in
his home town of Meridian, MS, that includes an entire steam
locomotive engine on a large slab of concrete. (Jimmie had been
involved in railroading -- a brakeman or some such, and in the films
was wearing his "railroad" clothes).    Linda and I and our kids
stopped at the monument site in Meridian once on one of  our vacation
trips about 1970 between Mize, MS, and Washington where I spent the
greater part of my work career.

      I still have three living sibs at Mize and another in Jackson, MS.
I never knew these short "sound" movies of Jimmie existed until I ran
across them on You-Tube yesterday. These movies were made, I
believe, about the middle or late 1920s. The scenery is faked, of
course, but the sound and pictures are Jimmie!  Here are three that
I've seen and heard. There are others -- without the motion pictures
-- on You-Tube.  Be sure the sound is turned on when you listen.  Hope
you enjoy.   Harold H.

 ===

GWH: As I listened to Jimmie Rodgers, I could remember all the people who
sang his songs.  As far as yodeling is concerned, if it did not sound
like Jimmie Rodgers, then it was not yodeling to me.  I see on
google.com that he now has a museum and park in his honor in Meridian,
which is probably the one you visited.
It is likely that some people in each community had a wind-up Victrola,
as Jimmie Rodgers was before the time of radio in our community.  We
also had no paved road in Smith County and, of course, no free
textbooks.  I introduced my grand daughter, Susanna Hough, to Jimmy
Rodgers.  I also pointed out to her the hobos on tops of the trains or
on the rods underneath them.  These are pictures of 1932 realities which
haunt those of us who lived through them.

[To find the recordings, just look for "Jimmie Rodgers" on youtube.]