Paul Burch On His Imagined Musical Biography of Jimmie Rodgers, Meridian Rising

Several years ago, Peter Guralnick, one of my favorite writers, and his lovely wife came to my house for brunch.  But they didn’t just come for the conversation. It is well known by the ever-shrinking population of vintage Nashville residents that my wife — the former owner of much-missed Red Wagon Café — makes the best biscuits you’ll ever eat. And though she now has a lunch café, the biscuits have stayed home. The only way to try one is by personal invitation. And who doesn’t love belonging to an exclusive food club?

So there we were — eating, talking, and eating more when predictably the conversation turned to Elvis and Sam Phillips. Pete mentioned that Elvis asked Sam to make him a tape of nocturnal sounds to help him sleep, such was Elvis’ deep respect for Sam’s sensitivity to sound (and his familiarity no doubt of their shared disregard for what anyone else would call normal hours). The question came up whether “That’s All Right,” Elvis’ first single for Sun (“That’s a holy song,” said Sam) had slapback, which is a controllable tape echo that Sam occasionally applied to brighten or excite a recording.

Pete contended the original 45 and 78 of “That’s All Right” on Sun did not have slapback, but that RCA added their approximation of tape echo (more like a lathering than a touch as Sam would use) after RCA bought Elvis’ Sun master recordings.  In other words, most of us have never heard what everyone else heard — and flipped out for — in 1954. 

I told Pete I had the most recent re-mastering of Elvis’ Sun recordings made from 78s (I might be wrong but Sam’s original tapes are not in good shape) and that though the 78s are much cleaner, I detected the slightest touch of tape echo, and that my own experiences in the studio proved you could add tape echo to “brighten” a track but still keep it virtually hidden as an effect.  The only way to settle the disagreement was to listen to the RCA reissue (my copy from 1976 bought at Peaches Records in Rockville, Maryland) and the latest Sun re-masters on LP.

We listened first to the RCA single — maybe only a minute, and then the cleaner version. The updated “That’s All Right” had us both once again (at least myself) spellbound. Neither of us said a word. After it was done, we agreed that we couldn’t hear any slapback on the original.  I told Pete: “It sounds better than I’ve ever heard it.”  Pete replied, “But I don’t think it could sound fresher. It’s just so great!”

That same feeling was in my mind when I first heard the recording of St. Louis-based guitarist Clifford Gibson (a former Paramount artist) and Jimmie Rodgers performing Rodgers’ “Let Me Be Your Sidetrack.” Rodger’s un-issued duet with Gibson enchanted me to imagine Jimmie’s life as a traveling musician but it would take me almost 15 years for me to take it on.

Gibson and Rodgers were in Louisville in 1931, each for their own session for RCA with their mutual producer Ralph Peer (Rodgers also recorded with the Carter Family while in Louisville). “Let Me Be Your Sidetrack” isn’t a perfect record. Jimmie often “jumped time” with his chord changes without losing the beat (a trait he shared with Charley Patton). But Gibson and Rodgers sound joyous together, freely communicating in (and out of) tempo.  Rodgers was fond of seizing any opportunity to play with musicians he liked, often bringing virtual strangers into the studio.

At the end of the surviving take (another was destroyed), Gibson anticipates Rodgers’ yodel with guitar lines that echo some of the same tuning and phrasing heard on Robert Johnson’s first recordings made at the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio five years later.  Johnson of course had a much broader — and brilliant — concept for composition than Gibson — his fine guitar playing aside. But the similarities of Rodgers and Gibson’s combined bravado to Johnson’s own enigmatic discography make for a terrific and unsettling listening experience.   

There is no sense of compass in “Let Me Be Your Sidetrack” (a white singer singing the blues with an articulate and inventive black guitarist ) any more than there is in “That’s All Right” which R&B djs called “too country” and country djs called “too black.” In Rodgers world, shared love of style and performance was commonplace. And it’s not hard to imagine that Robert Johnson too was informed by Rodgers’ energy for invention. (“He sang the hell out of Jimmie Rodgers,” recalled Johnny Shines.)

Rodgers’ love of the blues and his frequent collaborations in the studio with black artists including Louis Armstrong and the Louisville Jug Band were encouraged by Peer’s belief in Rodgers as the very kind of communicator (as Sam Phillips might say) he was looking for.  “He could sing anything” said Peer of Rodgers and throughout his long career in publishing thought of Rodgers as his ideal artist and a “true friend.”

My intention on Meridian Rising was to imagine a musical autobiography of Rodgers scored to the rhythms that Rodgers knew in the late ’20s and early ’30s — like the Mississippi Sheiks, Hoagy Carmichael, and Duke Ellington’s early bands (Duke also recorded at the same RCA Studios in Camden, New Jersey where Rodgers recorded his first “Blue Yodel” or “T for Texas”).

Recollections of Rodgers’ interactions with the outstanding musicians of his time as well as his disciples continue to be discovered.  Most recently Chris Strachwitz’ 1967 interview with Howlin’ Wolf revealed that Wolf was not only influenced by Rodgers (“that was my man” he told Topper Carew in 1970) but that Wolf actually met Rodgers on a plantation in Mississippi when Wolf was only 14.  Wolf was never one to exaggerate and in fact was steadfast in his memory of dates, times, and details. 

“Yeah that was my friend … I been with him a lot of times.  He just come through… He had different friends down there. On those plantations he had some friend. While he’d been down there, he just taken up with me. It seemed like I had a good sound sense. When I’d sit down, he’d be out there on the porch, playing to the white people. When he’d get through playing, he said you seem like you’re innocent.“Yes” I’d say. “I am” He’d sit down and yodel with me. He’d sit down and yodel to me and then I’d get out in the field and I’d yodel. I wouldn’t yodel just like him. I brought mine down more different.”

Rodgers’ deep desire to communicate and be taken seriously isn’t remarkable on its own perhaps. What is remarkable that long before it was fashionable (or lucrative) to draw from black music, Rodgers saw his relationship with the blues as elemental to his music.  Louis Armstrong — perhaps like Rodgers — understood that blues was the modern way to communicate.

“I’d been knowing Jimmie for a long time,” Armstrong told Johnny Cash during rehearsals for his appearance on Cash’s weekly series in 1969. “We met one morning and he said, ‘Man, would you like to sing some blues with me?’ And I said, ‘Okay, daddy; sing some blues and I’m gonna play behind you — and that’s the way the record started, you know.”

If we could go Cadillacin’ back then, we could chase the sonic bizarre Jimmie Rodgers knew — big bands with violins and string band blues trios. Fats Kaplin says the only difference between a fiddle and a violin is you don’t spill beer on a violin.

Perhaps the first lines of a true Jimmie Rodgers’ autobiography — his own Meridian Rising — would have read something like Ponyboy’s soliloquy that begins S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders: “When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home.”

But in Jimmie’s story he’d be walking out of the Ritz having just seen Bessie Smith in St. Louis Blues. But then Chuck D. or Sam Cooke or Elvis Presley might have begun their story that way, too, as could Billy Bragg or Jon Langford. Rodgers never memorialized himself in his correspondence even though he was well aware his every breath in the studio might be his last. (He was two years into a TB infection when Peer discovered Rodgers in 1927). Jimmie Rodgers was always trying to move forward, keep going, even though his time was running out. He fought like a lion but he was bound to lose. “I am building my new home in Kerrville, Texas,” he wrote to Martin Guitars in 1929, “I am getting along fine but I need lots of rest.” 

Paul Burch’s Meridian Rising was released on Plowboy Records earlier this year.