The "father of country music" Jimmie Rodgers grafted his signature high lonesome yodel onto the twelve-bar blues he learned working on the railroads. Produced by Ralph Peer, who named it the "Blue Yodel," the record fused white hillbilly song with Black blues — and became country's first major commercial hit.
A duet Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard performed on The Johnny Cash Show. Two giants of the next generation carried Rodgers' blues idiom onto national television, passing the lineage of the "father of country music" to a new era.