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

Jimmie Rodgers and the Semiosis of the Hillbilly Yodel Page 5 of 39
connection is impossible to establish with any certainty. 20 Tosches
appears particularly eager to assert the influence of Miller on Rodgers.
Yet as interesting as these theories may be, ultimately they are not
necessary to explain where Rodgers got his yodel. Quite obviously there
was no single source of influence upon Jimmie Rodgers, for the simple
reason that yodeling surrounded him on all sides: yodeling was everywhere,
in many styles and genres. To imagine it was Swiss troupes, or
Goebel Reeves, or Emmett Miller who influenced him is too specific,
and unnecessarily so. Black-inflected Tin Pan Alley yodel songs such as
“Alpine Blues,” “When They Yodel Ragtime Songs in Tennessee,” or
“The Ragtime Yodling [sic] Man”—this one with the yodel break over
an eight-bar blues chord progression—demonstrate that ragtimeblues-influenced
yodeling was widely current long before Rodgers,
Reeves, and Miller began recording. 21 Moreover, the variety of the
yodeled vocal figures Rodgers used reveals his eclectic interests as well as
his innovations. Clearly, he was influenced by many traditions and
styles, not by just one, and certainly not by only one performer such as
Emmett Miller, whose yodeling Rodgers’s resembles only occasionally.
Rodgers’s yodel figures include not only melodic patterns that would
have been familiar to a large section of his original audience, but also
other vocal devices that were drawn from other popular singers but
which apparently had never been coupled with yodeling. Yet these have
hitherto received scant, if any, attention. So while questions of priority
arise here somewhat incidentally, the present study is not concerned so
much with who did what first or who influenced whom, but rather with
the evolution in Rodgers’s recordings of preexisting patterns. In the
process, such issues as the influence of “black falsetto,” discussed later,
are problematized. The focus of this study is on the connotative uses of
yodel melodies and the codification of certain patterns in this body of
work, thus the term “semiosis” in my title.
The Nature and Significance of Yodeling in Jimmie
Rodgers’s Songs
Viewing the hillbilly-music phenomenon as a commercial endeavor—in
other words, not from the narrow point of view of the folklorists—
Richard Peterson in Creating Country, Fabricating Authenticity gives a perceptive
account of the nature of Rodgers’s material and especially the
role of his A&R (Artist & Repertoire) man, Ralph Peer. 22 Peer actually
had very little or no interest at all in the music made by the hillbilly performers
he recorded. It was purely a commercial concern to him. There
was a market for this music, he knew, and sizable profits to be made,
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