Reader Ron Haller-Williams is quick with his research on E-Sylum topics, but it can take a while for me to pull his findings together for another issue. Here's a distillation of some of his discoveries relating to the post-WWI coin-covered "Travel Car" Carol Bastable discovered pictured on a postcard last month. But it's worth the wait, for Ron can dig up information from the most obscure areas of the internet, such as this passage translated from a German-language webpage on the history of Country Music. Ron bolded some phrases that seem to reference the "travel car". -Editor

 

... the official starting signal for the music style "Country Music" fell with a handful of recordings on August 1, 1927, given by a certain James Charles Rodgers, commonly known as Jimmie Rodgers, who also recorded one of his famous "Blue Yodels", namely "Blue Yodel #1 – T For Texas".

Back to Jimmie Rodgers: Together with two musician friends, Lucien "Piggy" Parks and Goebel Reeves, the still unknown "Singing Brakeman" drove across the States in a Ford Model T and toured. Long before 1927, this tour happened and Jimmie Rodgers made the best use of the trick he learned from Goebel Reeves, eventually making it known and becoming famous as a result: American Yodeling. Goebel Reeves, who declared in one of his rare radio interviews "I made it a rule never to stay in one place longer than six months", logically travelled a lot, with America's entry into the First World War he even came as far as Europe. In Europe, he heard people yodelling for the first time, and he took that – in addition to a gunshot wound – back to the States. After finishing the tour with Rodgers and Parks, Reeves hired to get back to Europe. Somewhere in Italy, around 1928, just before returning home, he heard a familiar voice from a gramophone shop: Jimmie Rodgers, yodelling... Goebel Reeves' first reaction: "If Jimmie is successful with this, why not me?" Back in the U.S.A., he recorded dozens of songs that, with one exception ("Hobo's Lullaby", Woody Guthrie's later favorite song), didn't get a particularly big response...

Here are a couple more related citations. -Editor

 
Goebel Reeves and Jimmie Rodgers

And that, Dear Readers, is the long and winding path between coins and American Yodeling. Thanks! Very interesting connection to music history. It would still be nice to learn the fate of the Free Museum at Washington and whether the Travel Car and its coins have survived to this day. Great piece of American history. -Editor