Jimmie Rodgers and the Semiosis of the Hillbilly ... - Musical Quarterly

Jimmie Rodgers and the Semiosis of the Hillbilly Yodel Page 3 of 39
Academic Literature Devoted to Rodgers
Rodgers was central to the concept of “hillbilly” music, which began to
emerge in the mid to late 1920s, when the commercial recording industry
started to focus attention on the rural South, and he has continued
to occupy a key role in the historiography of hillbilly, or old-time, music.
When this music began to interest academics as an object of study, justification
for their interest was based upon the music’s relationship to
“folk” sources and to African American experience. Interest therefore
centered on Rodgers as a folksinger, specifically as a carrier or transmitter
of Negro blues traditions. His more obviously popular material,
although it constitutes a larger percentage of his corpus, was not considered
worthy of investigation.
John Greenway’s “Jimmie Rodgers: A Folksong Catalyst” is typical
of this approach to Rodgers’s music. 11 This was, according to Bill
Malone, “the first article on hillbilly music to appear in a scholarly
journal,” 12 a fact which further contributed to Rodgers’s special position
in the discourse on the genre. Greenway, however, was interested in
Jimmie Rodgers primarily as an exponent of folk music. Regarding his
music as folksong allowed the intellectual fiction of conceptualizing him
as an “exception” within the nascent recording industry and thus not
“just another radio practitioner of commercial hillbilly degeneration.” 13
The blanket dismissal of popular music on grounds of commercialism
typifies the mid-twentieth-century attitude toward much of the material
constituting the repertoire of the hillbilly singers: individual items were
always under suspicion of having been tainted with commercialism and
therefore rendered inauthentic. Only those songs whose pedigree could
be traced either through “folk” music (a dubious distinction in the first
place) or through black experience were considered valuable or worthy
of study. As Greenway explicitly states, “His miscellaneous and sentimental
songs are of little interest to folklorists.” 14
Greenway and others of his generation who were more interested
in folklore than in popular culture found “Rodgers’ work ...useful not
only for helping us understand some of the changes undergone by folksong,
but also for permitting the recovery of original phraseology which
has since become corrupt.” 15 However, for students of popular music
Rodgers is at least as interesting for his unique fusion of materials and
moods and for his remarkable commercial success. This makes his
“miscellaneous and sentimental songs” of particular interest, especially
with regard to following historical developments in a musical device
such as yodeling. However, in fairness to Greenway, whose work is
significant and important, it is necessary to recall that he clearly stated
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