This is a branching of the what if... thread.

Bert describes Jimmie Rodgers as taking the then folk music and becoming a pop star. I think that is pretty accurate, but there is a gap between that and the begining of country music.

His early stuff is not country music. Some if it is music hall music, some of it is traditional blues and some of it, he seems to have made up himself.

As far as I can see, country folk didn't yodel. Jimmie Rodgers adopted that as a gimmick and it was a crowd pleaser. The Victor company, seeing how sucessful it was convinced Sarah Carter to do it.

Gene Autry, who seems to have modeled himself after Jimmie Rodgers at the begining of his career, adopted the yodel and kept it even after he developed more of a crooner style and there seems to have been yodeling cowboys since.

The Swiss who migrated to America seem to have been too dour to yodel. (So some of their ancestors tell me.)

Of course cowboys must have made noises with cracking voices in their cattle calls, and the yodel was a credible stylization. At the time he started to yodel, Rodgers was not committed to being a cowboy singer yet. He seems to have gradually taken on the chaps and the ten gallon hat as he went along. His earliest album shows him wearing a railway brakeman's outfit.

That is getting off the track. The thing is, Victor sent its agent through the south to find talent because their country label was selling well. This agent found Jimmie Rodgers and The Carter Family on that talent hunt. Who were the popular country artists before that that were selling so well?

Murray