Twenty-five years ago, in a Southern Studies seminal in grad school at Vanderbilt, my professor mentioned as an almost offhand remark, “if modern media had existed in the 1920s, Elvis Presley would have spent his life as a third-rate Jimmie Rodgers impersonator.”
For some reason, that line sank into my imagination, and I began to envision what that world would look like and how it got there. What I wound up with was a world where for whatever reason, Robert E. Lee remained loyal to the Union and led the Army of the Potomac in a dead rout of the Rebels at Bull Run, ending the Civil War almost before it could start. Half a million men lived who might have died, including some who could make technology progress further and faster but differently, and the United States never became an is rather than an are. With the result that modernity was widely and wildly distributed, with major cities having art-deco sci-fi retrofutures while the rural areas remained barely changed, and by 1960…well, everyone has a civil war eventually, right?
That world became the setting for the Great American Novel that I never wrote and probably never will at this point, but thanks to Ken Burns, I’ve had an opportunity to think about it and revisit it somewhat. Jimmie Rodgers was undoubtedly one of the biggest media stars of his day, but the media was limited to phonographs and word of mouth, with a short film or two. It’s not hard to extrapolate that Gene Autry had the career that a healthy Jimmie Rodgers would and could have had, and Gene Autry literally started his career as a Jimmie Rodgers impersonator before dying as the richest entertainer in America.
But on Wednesday, August 4, 1927, in Bristol, Jimmie Rodgers recorded “Sleep Baby Sleep” in his first recording session. It bears all the hallmarks of a recording over ninety years old: scratchy, twangy, a voice from out of time. The sounds he made on that summer afternoon are still preserved: transformed to a string of ones and zeroes, kept in my wristwatch, and beamed via radio waves to plastic buds in my ears that electronically suppress the surrounding noise so that I might more clearly hear the guitar strings and voice from ninety-three years ago. To paraphrase William Gibson, we are too used to the marvel that a dead man sings.
The song sounds like a clear night, like empty railroad tracks disappearing over the horizon, like a two lane road through abandoned and haunted countryside. It manages at once to evoke the era of its recording and the era in which I first heard the name of Jimmie Rodgers: a clear cold night in Nashville with scratchy AM radio coming in from Cincinnati or Cleveland or St Louis. A liminal era, a new world just beginning to creep into view, a great unknown waiting to be shaped.