Happy birthday to the father of country music, Jimmie Rodgers. Rodgers was a tubercular 29-year-old former railroad man when he showed up in Bristol, Tennessee in 1930 to audition with his backing group for RCA Victor's Ralph Peer. The band was cleared for a recording session, but the group broke up the night before and Rodgers ended up recording two solo sentimental numbers. They sold well enough to earn Rodgers a second session, at which he recorded the first of his famous "blue yodels"--"T For Texas"--which catapulted Rodgers to stardom. When record sales evaporated during the Depression, Rodgers' popularity kept RCA Victor from bankruptcy. Rodgers' recording career lasted only six years (he died of tuberculosis at the age of 35), but he established the blend of sentimental tunes and blues numbers that was the pattern for country music for decades, and he left us with many remarkable recordings--including "Blue Yodel #9," an early interracial session with Louis Armstrong and his wife, Lil Hardin Armstrong.