A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - PLEDGE WEEK: “Blue Yodel #9” by Jimmie Rodgers

Episode Date: July 15, 2020

Welcome to the third in the Pledge Week series of episodes, putting up old bonus episodes posted to my Patreon in an attempt to encourage more subscriptions. If you like this, consider subscribing to the Patreon at http://patreon.com/join/andrewhickey . This one is about “Blue Yodel #9” by Jimmie Rodgers, but it’s really about two great women who shaped twentieth century popular music without much credit — Lil Hardin and Elsie McWilliams Click the cut to view a transcript of this episode: (more…)

This is not a proper episode of the podcast. Rather, this is something else. I've decided to hold a pledge week to try to get a few more subscribers to my Patreon. So every day this week, I'll be putting one of the backer-only episodes I've done over the past year up on the main podcast feed, so people can hear what it is you get

if you sign up for the Patreon, with this little introductory piece before them. If you're already a backer, you will already have this episode, so you can skip this, and everything else labeled Pledge Week. I do one of these every week for my backers, and backers even at the lowest levels get them.

If you sign up for a dollar a month, you get each new one as it comes out and access to all the old ones. There are 59 of them up so far, as well as a few other things like the monthly Q&As I've been doing for backers. I'm only making seven of these available on the public feed, so there's a lot still there for you to listen to.

If this works well, I might do another one next year, where there'll be another 50-odd episodes to choose from. None of this is meant to put any pressure on anyone who can't afford it to back the podcast. The podcast will always remain free to listen to, and I hope it will remain ad-free as well. I know times are especially tough right now, and many of you literally can't afford the money you're already spending, let alone paying any more out. I only want backers who can spare the money. But if you can afford it, and if you like these bonus episodes enough, then go to patreon.com slash Andrew Hickey, that's spelled H-I-C-K-E-Y, or follow the link in the show notes, and sign up,

and you'll get one of these the same day as every new episode. If you can't, well, enjoy this extra free bonus, and don't worry about it. Welcome to the latest episode of the Patreon-only bonus podcasts. For this episode, we're going to do something different from what we've normally done. In the main series, I've been going strictly chronologically. Each episode covers a fairly large period of time, but each song I've dealt with has come chronologically after the song before. This time, we're going to go right back in time to the beginnings of country music.

I'll be doing that kind of thing a lot more on these Patreon episodes, because the short length gives me the freedom to look at any time period I want, and to jump back and forth in the story. Today we're going to talk about two great women who don't get as much credit as they deserve for the work of the great men they were behind. Lil Hardin was the piano player for King Oliver's jazz band in the 1920s, when he hired a new second cornet player,

a young musician called Louis Armstrong. Armstrong was a promising musician with a lot of ability, but he was also a bit of a hick, badly dressed, with a bad haircut, and with no understanding of how to present himself on stage. He also had no ambition. He just wanted to play with his hero. Lil Hardin saw something in him, though,

and tidied him up. showed him how to act on stage, how to dress, and how to do his hair. She persuaded him that while he loved just playing in the same band as King Oliver, he could become a star himself. The two of them divorced their respective spouses and married, and when the time came for Louis Armstrong, who had been only second cornet when he'd met Lil, to become the leader of his own band, The Hot Five,

Lil Hardin Armstrong was its piano player. The recordings by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five were the records that built Louis' reputation as a musician, and which still to this day are regarded as the peak of New Orleans jazz, and Lil Hardin is all over them. Meanwhile, in North Carolina, Jimmy Rogers had had to retire from his job on the railway due to tuberculosis,

and was trying to make a living as a singer. I've mentioned Jimmy Rogers a few times, and if I'd decided to start the narrative in the 1920s, rather than in 1938, he would almost certainly have had a full episode devoted to him. He was probably the first big superstar of country music, but he influenced people in all sorts of other fields as well. For example, Howling Wolf developed his vocal style by attempting to imitate Rogers' trademark Yoda. In 1927, he began his recording career with records like Sleep Baby Sleep. Rogers is the credited songwriter on most of his work, but many of his songs were written or co-written by his sister-in-law,

Elsie McWilliams, who had played piano in his band and who he asked to help him whip his ideas into shape when he got a recording contract. McWilliams wanted to make sure her sick brother-in-law and his family would have money, so she only got credited on about half the songs she wrote or co-wrote,

giving Rogers the credit on the rest. And when she did get credited, she often gave Rogers the actual money anyway. Much later, she said, I didn't want a penny for those songs you understand. If there was any money coming, I wanted him to have it. He was sick and broke, and I loved them both so very much.

He kept after me to sign a contract, but I wouldn't. I didn't want any of his money. But he kept after me anyway, so I finally agreed to accept one twenty-fifth of a percent. I nearly fainted when I got my first royalty check. It was for $256.56. I signed it right over to the church. No one knows for sure exactly which songs McWilliams co-wrote, but she's generally credited with having worked on roughly a third of Rogers' songs.

This means I can't know for sure if she worked on the song we're looking at today, but whether she did or not, it's entirely possible that Rogers would not have been in any position to even be recording without McWilliams' contributions. Rogers' greatest successes were a series of recordings called The Blue Yodels, which started shortly after Rogers started collaborating with McWilliams, with Blue Yodel No. 1, a record we've repeatedly mentioned in the main podcast. For the ninth Blue Yodel, though, Rogers was inspired. by a record that had come out four years earlier.

The Bridwell Blues by Nolan Welsh, with Louis Armstrong on trumpet. So in what was, for the time, an extraordinary fusion of musical styles and an extraordinary collaboration between black and white musicians, he got Louis Armstrong and Lil Harding to add their jazz instruments

to his Blue Yodel No. 9. Within a year of that recording, Lil Hardin and Louis Armstrong would split up for good. Armstrong went on to become the biggest star in jazz music history, while Hardin never managed much greater success than being billed as Mrs. Louis Armstrong. And within three years, Jimmy Rogers would be dead. The tuberculosis finally took him in 1933.

At the time of his death, Rogers was selling 10% of all the records. on his label RCA. And while he's now largely forgotten, except to fans of country music's history, he was so famous at the time that 17 years later, an ethnomusicologist

studying the music of the Kipsigis people of Kenya recorded this. That's someone singing Chemi Racha Jimmy Rogers. Roll and love your way The mother's sea