George Jones

Best birthday wishes to George Jones, the most searing country music heart singer ever. Jones was a product of the Big Thicket in southeast Texas, a rough landscape that harbored even wilder inhabitants. George's father would regularly come home drunk and violent late at night and wake the entire family up, demanding that the kids sing to him, so George had a problematic relationship with music from the beginning. He wrestled multiple personal demons throughout his life, but he never lost his impossibly elastic, multi-octave voice, which year after year produced some of the most nakedly emotional performances in recorded music.

George Jones as a boy.jpg

The Blue Yodeler

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.

This video is presented as an historical reference by Empty Set Group, producers of "Waiting For A Train", the new Jimmie Rodgers musical. Information on the musical can be found at www.waitingforatrain.com.