My Carolina Sunshine Girl

Discover Simple, Private Sharing at Drop.io

Jimmie Rodgers, "My Carolina Sunshine Girl" (download until 2/22/09), from "The Singing Brakeman."

I'll begin by noting that the Amazon.com links for this record are to the six-disc collection that Bear Family put out of Jimmie Rodgers' music, not to a smaller collection. It's worth it. I have it. Please, note that there are some really reasonably-priced used copies for sale there, too. Get it. You will not regret it.

When I was a little kid, the first poet I remember really liking, even more than Shel Silverstein, was Robert Frost. I did a report on Frost in the fifth grade, and I can remember typing it--my handwriting was so bad that I started typing in the third grade, I kid you not. I really liked "Fire and Ice" because I was already having nightmares about nuclear war and it of course spoke to me. But I also dug his bit about two roads diverged in a wood, and I of course (like everyone else) knew that I, too, was on the road less traveled. In hindsight, that poem's a bit stupid, because everyone is on their own path and therefore everyone's road is the road less traveled. Frost must have been quite blind to human experience to miss that fact.

He might, however--Frost, that is--been referring not to himself, but have been writing in the persona of Jimmie Rodgers. Here we have the "Father of Country Music." Country is a pretty problematic genre if one looks at it as a social question rather than a musical matter, because country is so inextricably wrapped up with whiteness. I play country music, I love country music (not indiscriminately, of course), and I'm white, so I make these points from, I would think, the inside. I often make a point to friends that the most critical musical comparison one can make, looking at the 20th century, is between bebop and bluegrass. Both are virtuoso musics, but bebop innovated itself into the cool, then into post-bop, and into free. Bluegrass set up a structure against which musicians' worth was judged according to how strictly they conformed to it. Bluegrass became not really a tradition, but a straightjacket. The vested interest the bluegrass audience had in maintaining the social status quo manifested itself in a musical conservatism, even reaction. Bebop was always about change.

So it's really quite depressing how thoroughly country music missed the boat that Jimmie Rodgers got going, despite the fact that so many fantastic musicians came out of country. Jimmie Rodgers was eclectic and cosmopolitan, one might imagine because of the travels he had on the railroads. Listening to his collected works on the Bear Family collection, I can't help but think of Prince. He's that wide-ranging. Yes, it's true that jazz was just becoming popular when Rodgers' musical career began, but unlike most white people who imitated jazz, Jimmie Rodgers did his own thing with what he heard. I can't think of a more natural combination of different genres than "My Carolina Sunshine Girl."

Country as a social phenomenon seems to me to have followed the Carter Family model, to its detriment. We love the Carters, no doubt, and appreciate all the traditional tunes they preserved in their recordings, even if A.P. Carter took writers' credit for traditional tunes. The precendent, though, that the Carters set looked backwards, rather than forwards, quite the contrary of Jimmie Rodgers.

Part of Jimmie Rodgers' secret--this will be a quick observation--is his sense of form. I don't know another popular musician with a more unique sense of musical form outside of Duke Ellington or possibly Brian Wilson. In this, as in his most interesting tunes, we don't have simply a repeating form, like in a folk tune, or a Tin Pan Alley formula. Any number of Jimmie Rodgers tunes--"Daddy and Home" is another good example, or "I'm Sorry We Met"--follow no particular pattern, but move bar to bar along a musical logic unique to each tune. This is an almost absolutely lost art in popular music.