Singing Brakeman

Jimmie Rodgers, brakeman on the Southern Railway at Meridian, Miss., his birthplace, sang in a nasal, caressing voice each morning as he strolled to work.

I woke up this morning, the blues all 'round my bed

I didn't have nobody to hold my aching head. . . .

Negro laborers taught him to play the guitar badly. But nobody taught him his clear full-throated yodel that almost never broke into falsetto. When he was little more than 20 he married.

Something about you, mama

That sure gives me the blues.

It ain't your drop-stitch stockings

It ain't your buckled shoes. . . .

Somebody told him he ought to stop spitting, that his lungs were bad. So he went to Nashville, N. C.

I had to quit railroadin'

We didn't agree at all. . . .

Jobless, penniless, Jimmie Rodgers yodeled his way around the North Carolina countryside, drank all the corn whiskey he could get, organized a little band of hillbillies to sing for food and drink in tumbledown Southern hotels. In 1927 he read that Victor Co. was operating a recording station in Bristol, Va. He bummed his way to Bristol, wandered into the Victor building.

Hillbilly songs were already nationally popular and that day Jimmie Rodgers became the greatest hillbilly of all. Tired, unshaven, racked with tuberculosis, he twanged his guitar, sang and yodeled ''Sleep, Baby, Sleep." Victor made a record of it. Within a year it sold more than 1,000,000 copies, topping Caruso's sales for any single year of his career. Jimmie Rodgers' second recording was called "Blue Yodel." So popular did it prove that he followed it with a "Blue Yodel No. 2," then a "No. 3" until he sang 25 of them, sold 6,000,000. In all, he made 60 records, sold 20,000,000.

Jimmie Rodgers now had money. His records were played throughout the South, in New Zealand, South Africa, Australia, India. He could buy all the whiskey he wanted to forget his pain. He also bought a Buick, a Packard, a Cadillac, kept a chauffeur. He bought his father a home in Meridian, built himself a $50,000 house in Kerrville, Tex., where his wife and 13-year-old daughter now live. He wore loud neckties, occasionally a ten-gallon hat, tight-waisted coats. He did vaudeville turns throughout the land, met Will Rogers at a San Antonio unemployment benefit, stole the show.

One of Jimmie Rodgers' songs was called "Whippin' That Old T. B." A doctor told him he could never whip it if he kept on drinking, prescribed a codeine formula to allay his pain. But it was too late then. Last year in Manhattan tuberculosis whipped Jimmie Rodgers into his grave.

Jimmie Rodgers' death, however, did not put an end to the sale of his records. His widow still gets about $200 per month in royalties. His plaintive voice still yodeled last week from honkytonks in Port-au-Prince, cantinas in Colon, dives in Sidney. Lately Jimmie Rodgers' name was given additional immortality. Compania Vinicola Hispano Americano of Panama City put a Jimmie Rodgers rum on the market.

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