Paul Burch pays homage to godfather of country Jimmie Rodgers

Before country music, there was Jimmie Rodgers.

Born in 1897, he worked railroad jobs in the early 1920s, but like most sons plying the family trade, he wanted something else. Showbusiness called to him, and soon, due to a chance meeting with an ambitious record scout named Ralph Peer, Rodgers turned into one of the era’s biggest recording stars, wrote some of country music’s fundamental songs, and helped establish a signature style that would serve as a blueprint for country artists generations ahead. For those reasons, when the Country Music Hall of Fame opened in 1961, Rodgers was the first inductee alongside Hank Williams and Fred Rose.

That improbable journey is imagined in Meridian Rising, a new album by Nashville-based singer-songwriter Paul Burch. Although technically a concept album, a familiarity with Rodgers is hardly necessary to enjoy this lively set of songs. Burch pulls the listener into that creatively fervent period when popular music was not necessarily segmented by commercial genres but instead could sound like many things – Dixieland jazz, jump blues, folk ballads and novelty songs – often all at once. Rodgers was a natural showman with an easy, laid-back demeanor who could play it all, tying them all together with a signature yodel, an improvisational instrument so formidable it would hold its own against Louis Armstrong’s trumpet.

“People were really riveted by him. He comes across as a very loud singer, a strong singer. He must have had that kind of personality that created a buzz when he walked into a room,” Burch says.

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Rodgers was a man of his time. Between 1927 and 1933, he recorded more than 100 songs for RCA Victor that covered as many styles as there were subjects. Like the bluesmen of his day, he got to know the country by train, and his songs told tall tales. Blue Yodel No 1 (T for Texas), his biggest hit, was a 12-bar blues relating heartbreak, swagger and ultimately violence, each step along the way punctuated by yodeling, that sounded breezy as it did ominous. The song sold more than a half-million copies and catapulted him to fame.

He was an experimentalist but also understood how to sell a song. He adopted a railroad persona, the Singing Brakeman, that became the basis of a Hollywood film of the same name. He befriended Will Rogers, mingled with Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, and recorded Blue Yodel 9 with Armstrong and his wife, Lil Hardin Armstrong, that was one of the first-ever cross-racial recordings of the era. While field recordings of the time would capture rural musicians in unvarnished settings, or later commercial recordings classified as “hillbilly” played up common rural stereotypes, Rodgers was cosmopolitan in that he understood he was repackaging rural musical styles for a sophisticated urban audience. On classics like In the Jailhouse Now, Miss the Mississippi and You, Why Should I Be Lonely and Mule Skinner Blues, his sound was freewheeling, not mournful, and modern, not sentimental for the past.

“What makes him such a central figure in American music is that he was an independent personality and a stylist,” Burch says. “It’s hard to imagine Jerry Lee Lewis or Elvis Presley or Ray Charles or Johnny Cash without Jimmie as a model. He was pretty fearless.”

Burch moved to Nashville from Washington DC in the early 1990s. Over the years he has established himself as a literary-minded songwriter absorbed by competing styles of American music. Through working with the WPA Ballclub, his ensemble of respected Nashville musicians who tour with Jack White, Elvis Costello and other stars, he has earned accolades for summoning a true spirit in old sounds. Much like Rodgers himself, Burch is an adventuresome collaborator who has worked with everyone from Mark Knopfler to Vic Chesnutt to Jon Langford of the Mekons who makes a cameo on this album. He has an unbound curiosity for different genres, but in his hands, they sound only like him.

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The idea of Meridian Rising is one that followed him for years. The album is not a strict autobiography but was crafted to evoke the music of the era while imagining the people, thoughts and situations that Rodgers likely encountered during his brief life. It begins with a seductive jazz clarinet that leads the listener through Meridian, Rodgers’ Mississippi hometown. This could be a postcard lit with a match: stepping through the raucous nightlife and police armed with billy clubs, Burch’s narrator is hopping the train with no regrets. “Some day they’ll parade me ‘round/and like Sherman I’ll burn ’em down to the ground,” he sings. The album then becomes road music: the chugging rocker Cadillacin’ and country blues of US Rte 49. Through schemes and ambition, Rodgers travels through honky-tonks, a sinister Texas hotel, a New Orleans gambling den and other locations before ultimately to New York where he succumbs to his lifelong battle with tuberculosis in 1933. The balance of whimsical humor and sorrow follows.

Burch corresponded with Rodgers biographers and he read up on his subject, as well as spent listening time with the songs. But he also gave himself space to imagine the unknown. “Every time I knew a fact, I wanted to keep [the song] within the fact. But if they were going to be in Chicago on a Monday and Milwaukee on a Tuesday, I wanted to know what they did on that drive,” he said.

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So he made it up. The music carries that carefree spirit, the kind first-time listeners heard in The Basement Tapes by Bob Dylan and the Band, or in the minimalist country of Merle Haggard. The threads are not by chance — Dylan produced an album-length tribute to Rodgers in 1997 and Haggard recorded a double album of all-Rodgers covers in 1969. Meridian Rising adds to those works, not just through the music, but also by its insistent need to keep turning new corners.

“The nice thing is that because Merle made that record, I didn’t feel the need to rescue Jimmie because he was already a big guy,” he says.

The next stop for Meridian Rising is a June performance in Nashville where Burch will perform the album with the entire cast of musicians who played on it. From there, a theater piece is being explored. To be sure, there is enough Jimmie to go around because the music he made was pliable enough to last.

“I hope as time goes on, someone will interpret [the album] for the stage,” he says. “There was enough meat on the bones that I don’t have to be the final word.”