Original subtitles

MUSIC: Orange Blossom Special by Nitty Gritty Dirt Band

When I first moved to Nashville, I was 19.

I was too young to wait tables,

so I got a job as a tour guide at the Country Music Hall of Fame.

And it turned out to be such a blessing because I got...

I got to listen to so much music all day, every day.

It was my job to learn the history of country music.

We had this painting in the museum called The Sources Of Country Music,

the last painting of Thomas Hart Benton.

I had to tell people about it. I hung out with this painting a lot.

Looking at this painting is like looking at an old friend for me.

So it shows the barn dances, it shows the railroad,

riverboats, the gospel choirs,

the lap dulcimers

and the fiddles.

And it shows the cowboys, and the banjo coming from Africa,

and the slaves and how all of this came together.

It's just a beautiful thing to look at because it's the closest thing

visually, really, to what country music sounds like.

It's so colourful. There's so much energy in it.

Well, to me, it's soul music.

It's probably the white man's soul music.

And it comes from the heart.

I believe that you can go look

and find a country song to fit any mood you're in.

Any song that will help you feel better.

Sometimes it might make you cry, but you'll feel better

if you can find that song. That's what I believe.

Lovin', cheatin', hurtin', fightin', drinkin', pick-up trucks and Mother.

You also have to hand in there a few death, murder, mayhem,

suicide, you know, songs, you know, that are real.

I think it's just simple ways of telling stories,

experiencing and expressing feelings.

You can dance to it, you can cry to it,

you can make love to it,

you can play it at a funeral, you can...

It just really has something in it for everybody,

and people relate to it.

It's about those things that we believe in but we can't see,

like dreams and songs and souls.

They're hanging around here

and different songwriters reach up and get them.

Country music comes from right in here,

this heart and soul that we all have.

It's great music that really hits us because we're all human.

Country music, the songwriter Harlan Howard said,

is "three chords and the truth."

Truth telling, which...

Country music at its best is truth telling,

even when it's a big fat lie.

It's what American folk music has come to be called

when it followed the path of the fiddle and the banjo.

All of American music comes from the same place.

It's just sort of where it ends up.

And country music is one of the destinations.

FIDDLE PLAYS

Woo!

Yeah! RHYTHMIC CLAPPING

Woo!

Yeah!

Country.

MUSIC: Old And In The Way by Fiddlin' John Carson

By the early 1920s,

a Georgia factory worker named John Carson had been playing

the fiddle for nearly 40 years,

ever since his grandfather first gave him one at age ten.

Although music was his passion, he had to support his growing family

working in one of Atlanta's textile mills,

making 10 a week for 60 hours of labour.

But on Saturday nights, in the crowded factory neighbourhoods,

Carson and his friends started to make a little extra money

playing at square dances for families who had migrated

from their farms to Atlanta, now one of the South's biggest cities.

# I ain't got no money Got nowhere to stay... #

Fiddlin' John Carson soon began appearing wherever

an audience could be found - store openings and farm auctions,

Confederate veterans' reunions and political events -

ranging from Ku Klux Klan gatherings

to a rally in support of a communist organiser.

In 1922, Carson's audience expanded again, thanks to a new technology.

The Atlanta Journal again operating the South's first radio station,

whose call letters - WSB - stood for "Welcome South, Brother".

Anyone who could sing, whistle, recite,

play any kind of instrument, or merely breathe heavily

was pushed in front of the WSB microphone.

None of the talent was paid, but that made no difference.

They trooped to WSB to perform.

And Aunt Minnie stayed home to listen.

The radio exposure brought Carson invitations to play

at paid performances in country school houses

and small-town theatres throughout the region.

Until I began to play over WSB,

just a few people in and around Atlanta knew me.

But now, my wife thinks she's a widow most of the time

because I stay away from home so much,

playing around over this part of the country.

Radio made me.

But an older technology would now bring Carson and his kind of music

to even more people.

By age 31, Ralph Peer had risen through the ranks

of a new General Phonograph company.

In June 1923, Peer brought OKeh's engineers to Atlanta.

But after recording two female blues singers

and a quartet from Morehouse College,

he was introduced to radio station WSB's new celebrity,

Fiddlin' John Carson.

Peer was reluctant to record Carson at first,

uncertain a market even existed for old-time music.

A year earlier, Texas fiddler Eck Robertson had recorded two songs

for the powerful Victor Talking Machine Company,

but they had not sold well.

Ralph Peer decided to take a chance on Fiddlin' John.

He recorded Carson playing an old minstrel song,

The Little Old Log Cabin In The Lane,

romanticising slave life.

Fiddlin' John Carson comes up to the microphone and he grabs his fiddle

and he busts right into a tune that he's known all his life.

# Now I'm getting old and feeble and I cannot work no more... #

# My rusty bladed hoe, I've laid to rest

# Old master and mistress are laying side-by-side

# Their spirits now are roaming in the West... #

# ..changed about the place now And the darkies, they have gone

# You'll never hear them singing in the cane... #

In Atlanta, the record sold like hot cakes.

# The only friend that's left here is that good ole dog of mine

# And the little old log cabin in the lane... #

Peer realised that there was another segment of America -

predominately white, working-class Southerners -

eager to buy recordings of music they were familiar with.

Ralph Peer began looking for other artists like Fiddlin' John

and soon proclaimed in an advertisement that

OKeh had "uncovered" a brand-new field for record sales

and offered "Old Time Pieces" that were setting off, he said,

a "craze for this Hill Country Music."

By the 1920s,

slavery had been abolished for more than half a century,

but segregation was still rigidly enforced in every aspect of life -

except in the music that kept crossing the racial divide.

Through the ages,

blacks imitating whites,

imitating blacks, imitating whites.

You have the banjo, which comes from Africa.

And you have the fiddle,

which comes from the British Isles and from Europe.

And when they meet, they meet in the American South,

and that's the Big Bang.

African-American style was embedded in country music

from the very beginning of its commercial history.

You can't conceive of this music existing without

this African-American infusion.

But as the music developed professionally,

too often, African-Americans were forgotten.

Country music wasn't called that yet,

but it was music of the country.

It was the combination of the Irish,

the recently-freed slaves bringing the banjo into the world,

the Spanish affects of the vaqueros down in Texas,

the Germans bringing over the "Oom-pah" of polka music,

all converging.

Sprouting from so many roots -

old ballads and hymns, Tin Pan Alley compositions,

minstrel shows and African-American blues -

the music Ralph Peer and his competitors had begun recording

in the 1920s was hard to categorise or precisely define.

But for marketing reasons, the companies needed a name for it.

In 1925, Ralph Peer recorded a spirited string band

fronted by Al Hopkins in New York City.

As they were leaving, he asked what name he should use for them

in his advertising.

Hopkins answered, "Call us anything. We're nothing

"but a bunch of hillbillies from North Carolina and Virginia."

Peer had the name he needed.

Soon, magazines and newspapers were referring to the entire style

as hillbilly music.

Not every artist appreciated the term - or the way

they were often portrayed as quaint and quirky backwoods hayseeds.

The editor of Variety Magazine described hillbillies as

"illiterate and ignorant,"

"poor white trash with the intelligence of morons."

"Hillbilly was not a funny word," one musician said.

"It was a fighting word."

It doesn't offend us hillbillies. It's our music.

But if you're an outsider and you're saying it's hillbilly music

cos you don't know any better, it's almost like a racist remark.

If we're hillbillies, we're proud of that.

But you're not allowed to say it

if you don't know what you're talking about or mean it.

But as long as it helped sell records,

many performers were fine with it - including Fiddlin' John Carson,

who had already adopted the persona of a country bumpkin from

North Georgia rather than the former Atlanta mill worker he really was.

Radio was exploding.

There were now hundreds of stations in every corner of the country.

And to attract more listeners,

they all borrowed from one of the oldest traditions

of mixing music and commerce - the travelling medicine show.

In a medicine show, you come into town,

you set up in the town square and you hock an elixir.

You've got this remedy, and you'd pass out handbills

and you'd take personal testimonials from paid dudes

out there in the audience.

And they'd tell you about how wonderful they feel,

how their dropsy went away and how their sores and festering wounds

have healed because of this corn whiskey, this snake oil.

So you've got your product,

and music is only there to push your product.

Music is just like the soapbox you stand on.

It's all about the message.

And radio amplified that.

The radio changed everything.

Shenandoah, Iowa, had two radio stations,

owned by competing seed stores.

They staged fiddle contests

and live music from groups named the Cornfield Canaries

and the Seedhouse Girls.

In between, pitches for their products.

Sales skyrocketed.

And before long, Shenandoah - population 5,000 -

was flooded with visitors from all over the Midwest

who wanted to watch the broadcast in person,

prompting both companies to build ornate auditoriums, arcade shops,

a miniature golf course and tourist cabins to accommodate the crowds.

But they were soon eclipsed by Sears Roebuck in Chicago,

which launched station WLS - for the World's Largest Store.

On Saturday night, April 19, 1924, WLS premiered a new show,

the National Barn Dance.

It was modelled after a square dance programme

already popular in Fort Worth,

but the Chicago show quickly became the biggest of its kind

in the nation.

Meanwhile, in Nashville, Tennessee,

the success of stations like Chicago's WLS and Atlanta's WSB

caught the attention of Edwin Craig, the son of the founder

of National Life and Accident Insurance Company.

A radio station, he believed,

might prove an effective way to help the company's 2,500 salesmen,

who sold low-cost sickness and burial policies door-to-door

to working-class families in more than 20 states.

Edwin Craig's father was against it.

My grandfather thought it was a waste of money and time -

"We are in the insurance business, and that's what we should do."

But Edwin said,

"Oh, Dad, let me show you that this can sell insurance."

The whole idea was to sell insurance.

With his father's reluctant permission,

Craig set up a studio on the fifth floor

of the company's downtown office building, with thick carpets

and pleated drapes hung from the ceiling to improve the acoustics.

They began broadcasting on October 5, 1925,

with the call letters WSM.

"We Shield Millions".

And that became the logo of the station,

and it was built around a shield.

"We Shield Millions".

Craig recruited the personable George D Hay from WLS

and made him WSM's programme director.

Though only 30 years old, Hay called himself "The Solemn Old Judge"

and often punctuated his broadcasts

by blowing on a wooden riverboat whistle.

On November 28, 1925,

George Hay invited an elderly musician named Uncle Jimmy Thompson,

a fiddler since before the Civil War, to perform on the air.

He called his instrument Old Betsy - which he said had been passed down

from his ancestors in Scotland -

and that night, played for a solid hour.

The response persuaded Hay to schedule a regular Saturday night

Barn Dance on WSM, using local talent willing to work for free.

Within a few weeks, the Barn Dance had a new name - the Grand Ol' Opry.

It would eventually become the longest-running show

on American radio -

and it was doing exactly what Edwin Craig had intended,

reaching a far-flung audience to help National Life's sales force.

"Hello, Miss Jones. I'm from the Grand Ol' Opry.

"Can I come in a few minutes and talk to you about some insurance?"

"Your Saturday night shindig has got my floors down to the second plank,

"and I'm afraid someone will drop through on my barrel of preserves.

"Would you please send one of your agents down here to insure

"my carpets, floors, shoes

"and everything in connection with the household?"

George Britting.

To Peer, hillbilly music and the blues shared common roots.

But as a businessman, he was less interested in music history

and theory than in profits.

And by July 1927, he was enjoying plenty of them.

He had left his job with OKeh and joined the biggest recording label

in the nation, the Victor Talking Machine Company,

after making them an unprecedented offer.

He would work for no salary if he could control

the copyrights of the songs and collect the publishing royalties.

Then, he offered his artists something equally unprecedented.

Rather than buying the copyright outright for a nominal fee

and keeping all the royalties - as most publishers did -

he would share a portion of future royalties with them

if they had written the song.

He called it a square deal, one that had been denied artists in the past,

and many of his musicians were lured by the incentive

to follow him to Victor.

Among them was Ernest "Pop" Stoneman,

a carpenter from the Blue Ridge section of Southwest Virginia,

near the town of Galax.

When Stoneman had heard some of the early hillbilly recordings in 1924,

he told his wife he could sing better than that

and went to New York to prove it.

# It was on Monday morning just 'bout one o'clock

# That great Titanic began to reel and rock... #

His recording for Peer of The Sinking Of The Titanic became

one of the biggest hits of the day.

Soon, he was Victor's top hillbilly artist,

making enough money to buy some land and build a new home for his wife

and growing family, which would eventually number 23 children.

Peer wanted to make more recordings of Stoneman.

Stoneman suggested that Peer come to him

and bring his equipment to nearby Bristol,

a city which sat astride the Virginia-Tennessee border.

He promised that the region was home to plenty of other acts

that would make the trip worthwhile.

Ralph Peer had been corresponding with Pop Stoneman, who said,

"You need to come to Bristol

"so that we can capture some of this lightning in a bottle" -

the sound that was coming out of the hills around Galax, Virginia.

Peer and two engineers arrived in Bristol in late July 1927

and set up their temporary studio on the second floor

of a vacant building, a former hat company

on the Tennessee side of Bristol's main street.

They were using new equipment now which greatly improved

the fidelity of the sound, an electric carbon microphone

instead of a horn that permitted performers to sing with

greater intimacy rather than shouting to be heard.

All of the equipment, except the microphone,

would be hidden from the artist.

Stoneman and his group laid down ten tracks,

but much more important to Ralph Peer -

and to the future of country music -

would be the two acts that showed up in Bristol the next week -

three members of a family from nearby Maces Springs, Virginia,

named the Carters

and a former railroad brakeman from Meridian, Mississippi,

Jimmie Rodgers.

"Success," Peer once said,

"is the art of being where lightning is going to strike."

It was about to strike for him - twice and in the same location.

The only thing listed in the newspaper ad to me was,

"Bring your songs,

"bring your talent to the microphones to audition," whatever.

And they should have added, "We're going to start an industry now."

Because that's what happened.

The Carter Family were elemental.

# Springtime is coming, sweet lonesome bird

# Your echo in the woodland I hear... #

It's like... You know, it was the atom.

It was the beginning of the building blocks for the rest of us.

And those first recordings, and those songs,

they were captured rather than written.

You know, they were in the hills like rock formations.

So, in 1927, those first Bristol recordings,

these songs that were part of the collective unconscious

were gathered together, documented forever...

..with these plaintive voices and these elemental guitars.

The bedrock was formed for the rest of us.

Alvin Pleasant Carter was 35 years old that summer of 1927,

trying to make ends meet in the southwest corner of Virginia -

in one of the state's most impoverished counties,

in an area called Poor Valley.

AP had been born with a palsy,

a slight shaking in his hands and sometimes in his voice

that his mother blamed on a lightning bolt that had struck

the ground next to her just before his birth.

Although his schooling ended when he was ten,

he had learned to play the fiddle and read the shape note song books

used in the local Methodist church,

impressing people with his rich bass voice.

He took a job selling fruit tree saplings,

rambling for miles on foot from farm to farm.

In 1914, after crossing Clinch Mountain to find customers

on the more prosperous side - called Rich Valley -

he heard a young woman's clear and deep voice singing nearby.

It caught his interest.

So did the singer herself.

# With your arms around me... #

Sara Dougherty was barely 16 at the time

and steeped in old mountain ballads and gospel hymns.

A year later, they married.

AP brought her by wagon to a two-room cabin in Poor Valley,

later building a more proper home in the foothills of Clinch Mountain,

not far from Maces Spring.

As restless as he was ambitious,

AP would be gone for weeks at a time over the next ten years,

selling his trees while leaving Sara to care for their children,

tend the crops, chop firewood

and handle all the responsibilities of a mountain home without his help.

When he was home, they sang at church gatherings.

After one man gave Sara 10 because he said

she had "the prettiest voice I ever heard,"

AP got the notion they might make a little money with their music.

In 1926, a scout for the Brunswick label appeared in the region.

He was looking for a singing fiddler

and suggested putting Sara in the background

because he said a woman in the lead could never be popular.

AP wouldn't agree.

Instead, he added another woman to the group,

a younger cousin of Sara's named Maybelle Addington,

a shy teenager who had learned to play the banjo from her mother

as well as the autoharp.

Then, she took up the guitar and mastered it.

When Maybelle married AP's brother, Eck Carter,

the couple moved to a two-storey house less than a mile

from AP and Sara's home.

In late July 1927, AP heard about Ralph Peer's Bristol sessions

and announced they were going.

The women were reluctant at first.

Sara was still nursing her third child

and Maybelle, now 18, was pregnant.

Eck was against it, too, since his wife was so far along.

But AP was insistent, persuading Eck to lend him his car

by promising to weed his brother's cornfield in exchange.

It took them all day to make the 26 miles to Bristol.

The next morning, August 1, 1927, they auditioned for Peer.

"As soon I heard Sara's voice," he recalled, "that was it.

"I knew it was going to be wonderful."

That evening, the Carters returned to record four songs,

beginning with Bury Me Under The Weeping Willow,

an old tune Sara and Maybelle had known all their life.

# Bury me under the weeping willow... #

Although AP hadn't written the original,

Peer considered his arrangement of it -

and the others they played - different enough for Carter

to claim a composer's credit and permitting Peer to be the publisher.

# My heart is sad and I'm in sorrow

# For the only one I love

# When shall he see me?

# Oh, no, never

# Till we meet in heaven above... #

SHE LAUGHS

And so simple, right?

I mean, it's like you've heard the melody a million times.

That's one of those songs that feels like it's always existed.

If Taylor Swift or Carrie Underwood,

or whoever the hottest girl of the moment is,

wants to know where they come from,

they need to go all the way back to the voice of Sara Carter.

Cos she was the first one.

It's Sara, then there's been everybody else. It's that simple.

As far as guitar playing goes, there's Maybelle,

then there's everybody else.

That's the genesis of it all.

"We made it home," Sara remembered, "and never thought no more about it.

"We never dreamed about the record business turning out

"the way it did."

AP started work hoeing his brother's cornfield,

just as he'd promised.

Meanwhile, back in Bristol, Peer was about to record someone else

who would also change hillbilly music forever.

# All around the water tank

# Waiting for a train... #

Somebody told me this story one time

about Red Foley and Bob Wills and Ernest Tubb,

that they got together one time and -

they were all big Jimmie Rodgers fans - they said, "Could we...?

"Could we agree on our favourite ten,

"top ten Jimmie Rodgers songs?"

And they said, "Well..." After a lot of debate and talk,

said they couldn't get it down to less than 50.

James Charles Rodgers from Meridian, Mississippi,

was still a month shy of his 30th birthday in August 1927,

but he had already packed several lifetimes into those years -

most of them spent in constant motion.

His mother had died by the time he was six and his father -

who quickly remarried - was often absent,

working as a foreman

for the New Orleans and Northeastern Railroad.

Little Jimmie ended up in the care of a spinster aunt who was charmed

by his irrepressible good humour and indulged his adventurous spirit.

He started skipping Sunday school, then school itself,

preferring instead to shoot dice with the shoeshine boys

at a local barbershop, listen to travelling salesmen swap stories

or haunt Meridian's theatres that offered silent movies

between vaudeville acts.

He picked up the mandolin, then the banjo, then the guitar,

won an amateur contest singing

Bill Bailey, Won't You Please Come Home,

and, at age 13, ran away for a while with a travelling medicine show

before his father retrieved him in Alabama and put him to work

as a water boy for the railroad's mostly-black crews

who laid and maintained the tracks.

Just look at the train yards north or southbound.

You can almost see and hear Jimmie Rodgers

and those characters that he worked with in those yards.

And you can hear the music of Mississippi.

You can hear the music of the Old South being sung to him.

Almost like those field chants or, you know, the labour camps

or when they were dragged to hire.

You could absolutely see how Jimmie Rodgers took it all in.

# Ho, ho Hey, hey

# Hey, ho, hey... #

Off and on for the next decade, he held a series of railroad jobs -

flagman, baggage man

and then a brakeman on the run between Mississippi and New Orleans.

But it was never steady work.

He married at age 19, was separated in less than a year,

hoboed around the country, then came back to Meridian

and, in 1920, after his divorce came through,

married Carrie Williamson,

the 17-year-old daughter of a Methodist preacher.

Nine months later, she gave birth to Anita.

When he wasn't working,

Jimmie loafed around pool rooms and rail yards.

When he was working, his pay cheques quickly disappeared

on tickets to shows, on every phonograph record he could buy

and on a men's perfume he had discovered in New Orleans -

Black Narcissus - whose scent, he thought,

masked the harsh smell of railroad fumes.

His pockets all had holes in them.

Any money that went into them went right on out again.

He always declared that money was no good until after you'd spent it.

Then, it was good, for it had furnished you and those around you

with the good things of life.

"It was chicken one day, feathers the next," Carrie remembered.

"But it seemed that our chickens were mostly all feathers."

Rodgers joined another travelling show in 1923,

performing some blues numbers he picked up.

But it was cut short when he got called home

after his and Carrie's six-month-old second daughter died.

A year later came more bad news.

Working once more for the railroad, Rodgers developed a hacking cough.

Carrie noticed flecks of blood in his handkerchief.

A doctor diagnosed the problem.

It was tuberculosis -

at the time, the leading cause of death in the United States.

There was no known cure.

# Sleep, baby, sleep... #

On the afternoon of August 4th, 1927,

Jimmie Rodgers entered Ralph Peer's makeshift studio.

"I liked him the first time I saw him," Peer recalled.

Rodgers sang only two tunes that day - The Soldier's Sweetheart

and Sleep, Baby, Sleep.

He assured Peer that, with a little more time,

he could come up with a lot more.

Then he left town.

# While angels watch over you... #

During his two weeks in Bristol,

Peer recorded more than two dozen performing acts.

A few of them would go on to have long careers in the music business.

Most would soon be forgotten.

But by discovering The Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers, Ralph Peer

had set the future of country music in motion.

I think Jimmie Rodgers represented the rambling side of country music.

The desire to hit the road, leave responsibilities behind,

to go out and experience the world.

The Carter Family, on the other hand,

embodied the sanctity of the home, you know, the family,

particularly Mother, who kept the home together.

And those have been two important impulses

in country music ever since,

sort of the reverse sides of the same coin.

That November, shortly after his first recording had been released,

Rodgers showed up unannounced in New York City

with only 10 in his pocket.

He checked into an expensive hotel,

showed the desk clerk a copy of his new record

and brashly told him to charge everything to the Victor Company.

Then he called Ralph Peer to say he was ready for another session.

Among the four sides Rodgers recorded a few days later was one

he had strung together from a mixture of songs

he had heard over the years,

a standard 12-bar blues melody with snatches of borrowed lyrics

that introduced Thelma,

"That gal that made a wreck out of me,"

but bragged, "I can get more women than a passenger train can haul,"

then warned, "I'm going to buy me a pistol just as long as I'm tall,

"and I'm going to shoot poor Thelma just to see her jump and fall."

To it, he added what he called a blue yodel,

something he had been developing that also drew from deep roots.

The Alpine yodels that became popular in America in the 1840s,

then were adapted by black and blackface minstrel singers

at the turn of the century.

Jimmie Rodgers was conflating the blues

with the rural white experience and sound.

And I think this went on a lot.

We just don't see it until he showed up.

And, of course, he had that little yodel.

# Yo-del-ay-ee-ay

# Oh-del-oh-oh

# Oh-del-ay-ee. #

And people hadn't really heard that before.

He was tacking yodels onto just about everything,

Carrie remembered - even his share of conversation around the house

was largely yodels.

Peer released the new song under the title

Blue Yodel in the spring of 1928.

It was an immediate hit.

We had songs that spoke in the language they understood,

about subject matter they understood.

He had this wonderful ear and this wonderful voice.

And his delivery was totally...

Totally unheard of.

I think it came out of the black blues, mixed in with this yodelling.

They called him The Blue Yodeller.

Rodgers had even greater success with a song recorded in the third

session, also derived from African-American blues and

jug band musicians - He's In The Jailhouse Now.

We get to go to the other side of the tracks

when we buy Jimmie Rodgers' records.

We are able to go to those juke joints that we're not invited to.

Whether we know it or not, that's where the appeal is.

# He's in the jailhouse now

# He's in the jailhouse now... #

By Midsummer 1928, with the release of more songs - Brakeman's Blues

and a number Peer entitled Blue Yodel No. 2 -

royalties started pouring in,

1,000 a month, which Rodgers spent as quickly as they arrived.

He paid 1,500 for the Jimmie Rodgers Special,

a personalised Martin guitar with gold inlay,

his name spelt out in mother-of-pearl on the neck,

and the word "Thanks" emblazoned on the back.

He began a tour of major theatres and auditoriums in the South,

making 500 a week, sometimes appearing in his railroad outfit

and billing himself as The Singing Brakeman.

In Miami, appearing before a huge international men's Bible class,

he admitted he didn't know any church songs,

so he sang In The Jailhouse Now and the racy Frankie And Johnny instead.

They gave him a standing ovation.

Then he made a triumphant return to Meridian,

arriving in a shiny new car, wearing expensive clothes and

diamond rings and making a public point of paying off his old debts.

He talked about us. He was our representative.

As country people, he was our ambassador.

He was a rogue, just like the rest of us.

He had hard times, just like the rest of us.

But we appreciated him dressing up in his cool clothes

and driving in his fancy car and talking about us country people.

He represented us well.

Rodgers added a string of personal appearances

and autograph sessions at local music stores,

and caroused with old friends, despite his increasing exhaustion.

Each performance left him weaker, dripping in sweat

and gasping for breath.

One night, he blacked out backstage.

A doctor told him that, without proper rest,

he wouldn't live more than another year or two.

Instead, Rodgers booked himself on another tour

and another recording session.

Ralph Peer now began experimenting with new orchestrations

and styles for his star -

Jazz ensembles, small orchestras,

African-American jug bands,

ukuleles, champion whistlers,

or simply musicians Jimmie Rodgers happened to have met

the day before a recording session.

Peer said he could record anything.

It didn't matter to him where the music came from.

It didn't matter to him what the style was that he played.

I think he...

He was willing to do whatever was commercial,

whatever would catch the attention of the listeners.

To help him come up with more songs that could be copyrighted,

Rodgers had enlisted Carrie's sister, Elsie McWilliams,

a Sunday school music teacher with a gift for turning

an overhead phrase or random incident into a melody with lyrics.

Jimmie couldn't read musical notations -

"crazy little fly specks with funny tails," he called them -

so she often came to teach her new compositions to him in person.

In all, Elsie McWilliams would write or contribute to more than

a third of Rodgers' recorded songs.

Rodgers had relocated to Texas, whose dry climate had attracted

several sanatoriums for treating tuberculosis.

In his new surroundings, he became The Yodelling Cowboy,

inspiring a generation of followers to believe that all cowboys

not only sang but yodelled.

Sure, I'll give it that old guitar, then!

In the fall of 1929, Peer brought Rodgers to

a studio in Camden, New Jersey, to make a short talking picture.

Many music executives saw the talkies as a threat

to live performances.

Peer saw them as another

opportunity for his star to become better known.

# All around the water tanks

# Waiting for a train

# A thousand miles away from home

# Sleeping in the rain

# Though my pocketbook is empty

# My heart is full of pain

# I'm a thousand miles away from home

# Waiting for a train

# Yo-del-ay-ee-oh

# Del-ay-ee-ay

# Del-eeh. #

On May 14th, 1933, Rodgers arrived in New York City

and checked into the same hotel near Times Square

where he had stayed back in 1927 when he was a complete unknown.

As always, he was worried about money

and wanted to go back into the studio.

Ralph Peer was shocked at his appearance and insisted

he rest a few days before starting his recording session.

On May 17th in the Victor studio, he began the way

he had started his recording career -

just himself and his guitar.

# I've been away just a year today

# But soon I will cease to roam... #

In two long, difficult days, he laid down six songs.

# I'm yodelling my way back home. #

The tuberculosis was shredding his lungs and he was heavily

sedated for the pain, sipping whisky to clear his throat between takes.

The engineers had to carry him to his cab after the second afternoon,

and he rested for two days before returning to record two more songs,

propped up by pillows in an easy chair in front of the microphone.

On May 24th, he felt strong enough to stand at the microphone

and performed four songs,

resting on a cot in the rehearsal room between each take.

# Soon I'll be back in my old mammy's shack

# Yodelling for her this old tune. #

With the session over, Rodgers felt reinvigorated.

He took in Coney Island the next day,

had hot dogs for lunch,

drank a glass of newly-legalised 3.2 beer and napped in the sun.

But that night, back at his hotel, fits of coughing swept through him

and he began haemorrhaging bright red spots onto his pillows.

Early in the morning of May 26th, 1933, Jimmie Rodgers died,

drowning in his own blood.

He was only 35 years old.

His career had lasted less than six years,

but in that time, Jimmie Rodgers had recorded more than 100 songs,

many of which would be re-recorded for generations by other

artists as proof that they were staying true to the music's roots.

Jimmie Rodgers started it all.

Without Jimmie Rodgers, there would be no Bob Wills.

Without Jimmie Rodgers, there would be no Hank Williams.

Without Jimmie Rodgers, there would...

Who knows?

He was it.

His songs never go away, generation after generation.

Bob Dylan's recorded them. Waylon recorded them.

Johnny Cash recorded them.

Dolly Parton.

Everybody that is anybody has recorded a Jimmie Rodgers song.

His songs keep coming at you.

He set the pace for people like Ernest Tubb

and people like Hank Williams, people like me.

And...

Just a whole big section of country music wouldn't be here

if it hadn't have been for Jimmie Rodgers.

In the years that followed, the music that Jimmie Rodgers,

The Carter Family and others had made would continue to evolve,

continue to welcome new musicians and styles,

continue to grow as an industry and continue to reflect the experiences

of everyday Americans, especially during the hard times ahead.

# Oh-del-lay-ee, oh-del-lay-ee

# Mississippi and yo-ou #

# Well, good morning, Captain

# Good morning to you, sir

# Hey, hey, yeah

# Do you need another mule skinner

# Down on your new mud run?

# Hey, hey, yeah. #