A Singing, Crooning, Yodeling Slice of Country Music History

Dressed in bib overalls, a railroader’s denim cap and red bandanna, 79-year-old Otis Roy crooned in a drawling voice for a crowd of shoppers at an outdoor market in San Dimas.

“I got a barrel of flour,” he sang. “Lord, I got a bucket of lard. I ain’t got no blues. . . . Got corn in my crib, cotton growing in my patch.”

His audience seemed intrigued, even if none were likely to recognize the song, “No Hard Times.”

A Jimmie Rodgers imitator, Roy performs tunes made popular by “the father of country music” in the 1920s and 1930s. And he sings as Rodgers did then--simply and heartfelt, with no accompaniment other than a single guitar.

Had Roy’s recent appearance not been at a farmers market in the San Dimas Frontier Village, he--and the folksy songs as well--might have seemed even more out of sync with the times.

For in today’s MTV world of rappers, heavy-metal guitarists and country stars who glitter as much as pop stars, Roy’s performance can seem oddly dated when he sings of hobos, railroads, steam locomotives, hard times, lonesome prairies, and loves lost and won.

But Roy, a retired Pomona school custodian who once billed himself as the “Singing Janitor,” says he feels as strongly as ever about the timeliness of Jimmie Rodgers and his songs.

“His singing was clean, wholesome. It told a story how people lived in those days,” Roy said. “Seems like today . . . (singers) always want to talk about drinking, or cursing some woman out or sex. You got to practically swear. Just like with the television today.”

As Roy spoke, the stereo at his modest Victorian house in Pomona carried the lilting voice of Rodgers singing about “where the coyotes howl and the varmints prowl.”

Roy, whose slight build mirrors the reed-thin frame of the late Rodgers, has been excited by that voice for 65 years. Before there was television, when Roy was a 13-year-old son of a Missouri sharecropper, he first heard Rodgers on the radio.

“He just lit me up,” Roy said, sounding like those of other generations describing their first exposure to Frank Sinatra or Elvis or the Beatles or Madonna. “I don’t think ever a teen-ager was lit up as high as I was.”

Since then, Roy has been near-to-obsessed with the man who in 1961--three decades after dying from tuberculosis at age 35--was named as the first member of the Country Music Hall of Fame.

As a boy growing up “as poor as poor could be,” Roy practiced the Rodgers songs while working in cotton patches around Mississippi River towns of Arkansas and Missouri.

“I just would pick cotton, yodel, pick cotton, yodel,” Roy said, explaining how he learned to yodel like Rodgers, who had adapted his style from German and Swiss yodeling made popular by vaudeville.

In 1929, when Rodgers, a former railroad worker in the South, was skyrocketing to fame as the “Singing Brakeman,” he came to the tiny Missouri town of Charleston near where Roy lived. Roy, his brother and two buddies went to the show, paying 30 cents a ticket.

With about 75 other people, Roy sat in a former grocery warehouse that had been converted into a silent movie theater and performance hall. “His yodeling, his singing, it just hit me,” said Roy, who in his shows often refers to that magical moment when he was a 15-year-old.

Though he sang Rodgers’ songs for years, Roy didn’t go on stage until the 1960s. He started appearing in talent shows at country music nightclubs in Southern California, his home since the late 1940s. Roy’s biggest boost, he said, came in the early 1970s when he earned $150 in a talent show at the Palomino, a North Hollywood nightclub.

He gradually moved from amateur status to semiprofessional. Starting in 1975, when he retired as a custodian in the Pomona school system, he performed even more, appearing at street festivals, retirement homes, civic groups and fairs, now billing himself as “Pomona Blue Yodeler.” And he has adapted his yodeling into an award-winning style of hog-calling that he uses at Los Angeles County Fair contests.

Although his sometimes-faltering voice lacks the polish of today’s country singers and he is 44 years older than Rodgers was when he died, Roy has his fans.

“He’s keeping a grand old fella’s music alive,” said Ralph T. Hicks, 84, a Baldwin Park country music entrepreneur who booked him at nightclubs he once owned.

“Of course, he’s not a young guy like Jimmie Rodgers was,” Hicks said. “But he sounds like Jimmie Rodgers did back then.”

“A slice out of history” is how Roy’s guitar accompanist Penelope Torribio of West Covina describes him. Torribio, who is education director at Covina’s Charter Oak Hospital, said: “We’re pulling away from our farm roots in this country. But here he was a sharecropper who grew up in a family of 13. Could you imagine somebody today being a sharecropper in a family of 13?”

By hearing Roy sing Rodgers songs, she said, “you get living history.”

In his performances, imbued with a meandering storytelling style, Roy mixes his own songs and some by Torribio with the 30 of the 110 Rodgers songs he knows by memory. The strength of his performance, Roy said, rests in the songs of Rodgers, who recorded with jazz great Louis Armstrong and inspired performers as diverse as Gene Autry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Ernest Tubb and Johnny Cash. Some songs Rodgers made famous that remain popular today are “ ‘T’ for Texas,” “In the Jailhouse Now,” and “Frankie and Johnny.”

In Roy’s own compositions, the Rodgers influence is evident. One tune, called “Thank You, Nell,” details Roy’s marriage as a teen-ager, which produced two children but ended in divorce because of his drinking.

Roy quit drinking, he said, not long after he had married his present wife, Alyce, his spouse for 44 years. But many years of his early life, he said, were spent struggling to find work or keep a job, or wandering from place to place--in some cases from small-town jail to small-town jail. Once, he said, as a young man he--like Rodgers--worked on a railroad section crew. But Roy lost his job because he showed up drunk for work.

Rodgers’ tunes that celebrate the railroading life and rural America, Roy said, speak to his own personal blues. Even today, Roy said, when he sings or just listens to Rodgers’ songs, they touch him deeply.

“Now this is facts,” Roy said, using a phrase he often does. Once while he was driving in his car, Roy said, he heard a Jimmie Rodgers cut on a country music radio station.

“It may sound ridiculous to some people,” he said, “but tears dampened my eyes.”