CHAPTER 11 | THE BIG BANG IN BRISTOL 271
decade he worked a variety of train jobs that carried him throughout the South
and Southwest, as far as the Pacifi c Coast. W hen tuberculosis ended his railroad
career, Rodgers devoted himself more fully to music, playing banjo and guitar in
a variety of small ensembles and working his way to Asheville, North Carolina,
where he had a radio show on W WNC.
As a member of a string band, Rodgers traveled to Bristol to play for Peer.
W hen the band members argued over what name to use on their records, Rodgers
parted company with the others and persuaded Peer to record him as a solo act.
He sang two sentimental waltz songs to his own guitar accompaniment that day,
“The Soldier’s Sweetheart” and “Sleep, Baby, Sleep.” The second song, of uncer-
tain origin, combines a strophic lullaby with a yodeling refrain, reminiscent of
J. K. Emmet’s once-famous “Lullaby” from Fritz, Our German Cousin, a stage success
of the 1870s. Emmet’s song survived into the phonograph era and no doubt was
familiar to Rodgers and other rural music lovers. Alpine yodeling had been a fea-
ture of touring singing acts such as the Tyrolese Minstrels as far back as the 1830s.
That Rodgers chose to audition for Peer with such antiquated material speaks to
the persistence of older forms of entertainment in the rural South of the 1920s.
W hen Victor released Rodgers’s two Bristol recordings in October, Rodgers
traveled to New York City and contacted Peer, informing him that he was ready
to record more sides. One of the four songs he recorded there eventually sold
more than one million copies. Originally titled simply “Blue Yodel,” it was later
renamed “Blue Yodel no. 1 (T for Texas)” after its success inspired a series of
related songs. By combining the blues with yodeling, Rodgers put a twist on the
twelve-bar blues that was new to the record industry.
In his thirteen blue yodel records, Rodgers sometimes sings a standard blues
chorus—a rhymed couplet, with the fi rst line repeated—followed by a few bars of
yodeling. In others, such as “Blue Yodel no. 8 (Muleskinner Blues)” (LG 11.3), he
sings the couplet in the fi rst two phrases of each chorus, yodeling for the third
phrase. “Muleskinner Blues” begins as a dialogue between the foreman of a rail-
road construction crew and a job applicant looking for work as a mule driver
or “skinner” (mule-powered wagons were then standard equipment in railroad
construction). The applicant’s ethnicity would have been apparent to any listener
at that time: he addresses the foreman as “captain,” a common black locution,
and the foreman in turn calls him “Shine,” a derogatory term referring to shoe
shining, an activity in which whites and blacks frequently came into contact,
always with the black person in a position subservient to the white customer.
The subsequent verses are in the voice of the muleskinner, who brags about
his prowess in driving mules, thus echoing the boasting theme found in many
songs drawing on African American folk traditions. Mention of the “good gal”
who awaits his paycheck leads to a verse of dialogue between the muleskinner
and his gal, in which the line about turning down the damper (to reduce the heat
in a wood stove) recalls the veiled sexual references of classic blues records. The
reference to a Stetson hat, for present-day listeners, may evoke the image of a
cowboy; in the early years of the twentieth century, however, hats manufactured
by the Stetson Company were status symbols and appeared often in African
American songs—most notably the traditional ballad “Stagger Lee,” in which the
title character kills another man over a Stetson hat. Similarly, Louis Armstrong
recalled the status conferred by a Stetson hat among musicians in the early days
of New Orleans jazz.auditioning for Peerblue yodelsLG 11.3172028_11_254-279_r3_ko.indd 271 23/01/13 8:42 PM