An Introduction to America’s Music

CHAPTER 11 | THE BIG BANG IN BRISTOL 273

CD 2.7 Listening Guide 11.3 “Blue Yodel no. 8 (Muleskinner Blues)” JIMMIE RODGERS

Listen & Refl ect

1. How does Rodgers build musical interest over the three minutes of this record?


2. What elements of Rodgers’s performance resemble Bessie Smith’s “St. Louis Blues”
   (see LG 11.1), and what elements differ?

timing section text comments

2:33 chorus 6 I smell your bread a-burning, turn

your damper down

If you ain’t got a damper, good gal,

turn your bread around

Return to 3-phrase structure of

choruses 1 and 2. Melody of phrase 2

varied by ascending to a new apex, the

blue third.

Rodgers’s “thumb-and-brush” guitar playing resembles the Carter style,

though without Maybelle Carter’s rhythmic security. Single notes on the bass

strings mark the two beats in each bars, with chords on the higher strings fall-

ing between the beats—the accompaniment pattern of the left hand in rag-

time piano, transferred to the guitar. Short bass runs enliven the texture, and

Rodgers even attempts a guitar solo in the second half of the record.

Characteristic of Rodgers and his many country imitators is a fl exible

approach to blues phrasing. Although the three phrases of the twelve-bar blues

chorus are easy to distinguish, some phrases contain more than four bars. The

fi rst chorus, for example, consists of 5 + 6½ + 5 bars. While many black country

blues singers similarly stretched or contracted phrases, their use of varied guitar

textures smoothed over any sense of irregularity (see chapter 14 for a discussion

of country blues). Rodgers’s steady “boom-chang” texture, in contrast, draws

attention to the sometimes lurching rhythm.

In short, both music and lyrics of “Muleskinner Blues” draw deeply from

African American culture. In his railroad jobs Rodgers had worked in close con-

tact with black laborers, and his absorption of black folkways is evident in many

of his records. Rodgers’s blue yodels demonstrate how country music, though

considered then and now perhaps the “whitest” of popular music genres, from

its inception was tied to black music.

The music and subject matter of the blue yodels stand in contrast to the songs

of the Carter Family. Rodgers did record nostalgic songs similar to favorite Carter

Family themes, especially songs about family ties and chaste, often unrequited

love. But many of his most successful songs celebrated the wandering life and

the lure of drinking, gambling, and violence. Even more than the Carter Family,

Jimmie Rodgers embraced country music’s full spectrum of subject matter.

Rodgers’s records also demonstrate the eclecticism of early country music.

In addition to solo records, he often recorded with small ensembles, sometimes

Rodgers’s phrasing

Rodgers’s song types

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