My grandaddy played with his band, and my mother still has the ukelele he used at that time.
The Father of Country Music. That's a heavy load for a scrawny, tubercular ex-railroader who set out only to prove to the folks back home in Meridian, Mississippi, that he wasn't the shiftless no-count they all thought he was.
When Jimmie Rodgers arrived on the scene, there was no such thing as 'country music.' It was just beginning to be called 'hillbilly' - and whatever it was, Jimmie Rodgers wasn't much interested. He dressed in the latest uptown-style box-back coat, bow tie, and snappy straw boater and cultivated a broad repertoire which, at the outset at least, leaned decidedly in the direction of current hits from Tin Pan Alley: Who's Sorry Now?, I'll See You In My Dreams, How Come You Do Me Like You Do?, and similar pop fare of the 1920's.
From the beginning, however, Jimmie Rodgers was nothing if not versatile. Over the years, scuffling from town to town as an itinerant brakeman and would-be entertainer, he had absorbed the haunting blues music of his Southern upbringing and the rowdy, colorful ballads of railroaders and rounders all across the land. So, when he met up with a big-time record producer who wanted 'old-timey' folk songs, or original compositions that sounded like them, it was altogether natural that he turned to the simple, plaintive, often whimsical music sung and played among the ordinary people he'd known from childhood. "They want these old-fashioned things," he told his wife. "Love songs and plantation melodies and the old river ballads. Well, I'm ready with 'em. And I've got some new ideas for songs too, in the back of my head - when I get 'em worked out."
The new songs he called 'blue yodels.' They combined the raw energy of jazz and the poetry of the blues with that particularly rustic, home-spun vocal embellishment known as the yodel. Add a driving, eloquent guitar and Rodger's personal magnetism - the cocky little boy grin and the winsome drawl, along with a heady sense of someone who'd done hard-traveling and lived to tell about it - and you have the beginnings of country music, even if it didn't get it's proper name for another twenty years.