Blue Yodel

The Blue Yodel songs are a series of thirteen songs written and recorded by Jimmie Rodgers during the period from 1927 to his death in May 1933. The songs were based on the 12-bar blues format and featured Rodgers’ trademark yodel refrains. The lyrics often had a risqué quality with “a macho, slightly dangerous undertone”. The original 78 issue of "Blue Yodel No. 1 ("T" for Texas)" sold more than a half million copies, a phenomenal number at the time. The term "blue yodel" is also sometimes used to differentiate the earlier Austrian yodeling from the American form of yodeling introduced by Rodgers.

Jimmie Rodgers’ background in the blackface minstrel-shows and as a railroad worker enabled him to develop a unique musical hybridisation drawing from both black and white traditions, as exemplified by the Blue Yodel songs. In his recordings Rodgers and his record producer, Ralph Peer, achieved a “vernacular combination of blues, jazz, and traditional folk” to produce a style of music then called ‘hillbilly’.

Rodgers’ Blue Yodel songs, as well as a number of his other songs of a similar pattern, drew heavily on fragmentary and ephemeral song phrases from blues and folk traditions (called ‘floating lyrics’ or ‘maverick phrases’).

Jimmie Rodgers’ yodeling refrains, perhaps mimicking a mournful train whistle, are integral to the Blue Yodel songs. Rodgers’ loping and melancholy vocal ornamentations have been described as “that famous blue yodel that defies the rational and conjecturing mind”. Rodgers himself apparently viewed his yodeling as little more than a vocal flourish; he described them as “curlicues I can make with my throat.”

Jimmie Rodgers said he saw a troupe of Swiss yodelers doing a demonstration at a church. They were touring America, and he just happened to catch it, liked it, and incorporated it into his songs.

It has been suggested that Rodgers may have been influenced by the yodeling of Emmett Miller, a blackface minstrel-show singer who recorded for Okeh Records from 1924 to 1929. Singers such as Vernon Dalhart, Riley Puckett, and Gid Tanner incorporated yodeling in recordings made in the mid-1920s; Rodgers recorded a version of Riley Puckett's “Sleep, Baby, Sleep" in August 1927.

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