It's interesting the many different ways Jimmie did this song.   He changed the melody in this recording--(which seems to be from a movie--anybody know more about this?) from the tune he's frequently thought of as using. It's quite similar but there are changes. Obviously he just did it the way he felt at at any given time.

I wonder how the sheet music (there must have been sheet music eventually for such a smash hit) went.

Jimmie dominated "hillbilly" music (and a lot more) so completely that "every label wanted its own Jimmie Rodgers" and lots of would-be singers, like Gene Autry (who went to New York in 1928 as Orvon Grover Autry, and shed that name there) were strongly urged to learn to yodel, since yodeling was the key to a recording contract. So Gene went home and did it, starting out his career doing an amazingly good imitation of Jimmie.

A real interesting recording of this for me is the one with the jazz group--does it include Louis Armstrong?-- backing Jimmie up---proving that boundaries at that time between "hillbilly (as it was then called) and jazz were amazingly fluid.