This is Side Door, a podcast from the Smithsonian with support from PRX.

I'm Halima Shaw. I had a friend named Camo he used to rob steel and gamo he tried it This is Jimmy Rogers. You may have heard of him. He tried everything that was low down.

This is Jimmy Rogers. You may have heard of him, but if you haven't know this. In a short six-year

recording career, he managed to become the father of country music.

Seriously, his plaque at the Country Music Hall of Fame calls him, quote, the man who started it all.

Rogers grew up in Mississippi and worked on the railroad from childhood.

On the tracks, Little Jimmy learned about life,

but he learned a lot about music. He was a sponge, soaking up all the sights and sounds around him. Here's musicologist Mary Davis who

edited a book about Jimmy Rogers. He was around blues. He was around American roots music. He was around

American roots music. He was exposed to African American work song.

Even when Rogers became a full-time musician,

his railroad years were never entirely behind him.

Davis says that Jimmy did something that no one else did before him.

He took morsels of different musical traditions that he encountered in his railroad work,

threw them all in one pot, and put them over a burner,

kind of like he was making musical gumbo.

He was the guy who pulled all those things together

into something new and exciting.

You can hear his fusion of styles and songs like this one called Everybody Does It in Hawaii

Or as Jimmy would say Hawaii

Everybody Does it in Hawaii.

The old girl it in he may be.

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