Barry Mazor discusses the musical reach and influence of American icon Jimmie Rodgers

Jimmie Rodgers became known as "The Father of Country Music," but as Barry Mazor illustrates in his new book, Meeting Jimmie Rodgers, he was much more than a musical ancestor of The Outlaws. Though his last recording took place over 80 years ago, his influence remains pervasive in popular music and culture. Mazor goes beyond Rodgers' biography to explain how he changed not just country music but the landscape of popular music as a whole. For Mazor, Jimmie Rodgers isn't a relic of music history; he's a modern icon.

Mazor, who lives in Nashville, has been writing about American music since the 1970s. He was a longtime senior editor for the roots and pop music magazine No Depression and is a frequent contributor to the The Wall Street Journal. He will discuss and sign Meeting Jimmie Rodgers at Davis-Kidd Booksellers on Nov. 14 at 2 p.m.

Before we get to the heart of your book, can you provide a bit of context? Who was Jimmie Rodgers, and why is he known as the "father of country music"?

Jimmie was a guitar-playing, singing vaudevillian who cut over a hundred sides for Victor records from 1927 to 1933, many of them songs he wrote, co-wrote or adapted, hits in his day that have been recorded by hundreds of performers, across musical genres and international borders, time and time again, ever since, right into our own [day]— "T for Texas," "Waiting for a Train," "Any Old Time," "In the Jailhouse Now," "Mule Skinner Blues" and "Miss the Mississippi and You" among them.

He was a touring and recording star of something like Elvis proportions for that day, and known by a variety of monikers, like a Greek god or James Brown—"The Singing Brakeman" (he'd worked on trains), "America's Blue Yodeler" (he had a deep feeling for the blues, recorded a lot and incorporated a distinctive yodel that set off a blue-yodel craze) and eventually, some 20 years after his early death from tuberculosis in 1933, "The Father of Country Music."

Jimmie sang of subjects and themes that helped define what would come to be known as country music (though he never heard the term in his time)—of rough-and-rowdy outlawry and drinking, rambling and hoboing, working hard and winning and losing in love, of life down home with the family and also in the saddle. And with musical backing and a modernizing vocal attack that suggested or started music down the road to honky-tonk, Western swing, cowboy songs, confessional singer-songwriter ballads and elements of folk, bluegrass and rockabilly.

You call Jimmie Rodgers "America's first roots music hero." What do you mean?

Rodgers was not just a star—he was the first performer in the mass-media age who came from a down-home, working-class sort of background (in his case, out of Meridian, Miss.), performing music that had ties to that place and its past.... He became nationally and even globally renowned, never tried to hide where he was from and who he was but reveled in it and made much of it, even as his musical vistas expanded. His accent was heard on the records, not stifled; he sang about lard and working life and love down home—and kept doing it even as he reached stardom and fairly publicized success and wealth. He was "one of us" writ large and cool to the folks who could so easily identify with him, and he brought their life and style to the wider world even as he brought the wider modern world to them. That's what I mean by a roots music hero, and he cleared the way for that sort of career and impact for others who followed—a Gene Autry, a Bob Wills, an Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash or Bob Dylan and, for that matter, a Dolly Parton or Sam Cooke, unelected representatives and roots music heroes all.

As you point out, Meeting Jimmie Rodgers isn't a biography but rather a close examination of one man's influence on 80 years of recorded music. What are some examples of the way Rodgers' influence reaches beyond what is considered country music?

It begins with that way of being a roots music hero, really—how he carried himself and brought along an audience to expansive new places. But more specifically, he was the first to really bring modern, up-close, for-the-microphone-style singing to blues and hillbilly and the old parlor ballads, emphasizing the meaning of words and lines as he sang, clarifying the narratives and stamping his own personality onto everything he sang. That personality combined wit, unmitigated physicality and joy of performing, presented in ways that have been models for a wide variety of performers. And if we simply look at the image and notion of this man, who often sang of his own story, up on a stage alone with his guitar, riveting people—that's a model that's still at work, of course, well beyond the boundaries of country music.

Your approach, a biography of the music rather than the man, complete with exhaustive documentation in the form of playlists and discographies, is novel. What led you to this approach, and can you talk a bit about the process of writing Meeting Jimmie Rodgers?