I believed it all jimmie rodgers biography

The Country Music Hall of Fame justifiably hailed “Singing Brakeman” and “Mississippi Blue Yodeler” Jimmie Rodgers as “the man who started it all.”

Although his brief six-year career was cut tragically short by tuberculosis, Rodgers became the first nationally known star of country music.

 His songs about rounders and gamblers, bounders and rounders directly later generations of performers from Ernest Tubb and Hank Williams to Lefty Frizzell and Merle Haggard.

The youngest son of a railroad man, Rodgers was born in the small Alabama town of Geiger and raised in Meridian, Mississippi.  At the age of 14, he went to work as a railroad brakeman, where he stayed until a pulmonary hemorrhage sidetracked him to the medicine show circuit in The years with the trains harmed his health but helped his music.

In an era when his contemporaries were singing only mountain and mountain/folk music, Rodgers fused hillbilly country, gospe