Blue yodel

The songs were based on the 12-bar blues format and featured Rodgers’ trademark yodel refrains.

Rodgers' background in the blackface minstrel shows and as a railroad worker enabled him to develop a unique musical hybridization drawing from both black and white traditions, as exemplified by the blue yodel songs.

[2] Rodgers' recording and performing successes in the late 1920s and early 1930s ensured that yodeling "became not only an obligatory stylistic flourish, but a commercial necessity".

[5] When members of Kenya's Kipsigi tribe first encountered the blue yodels in the 1940s, they attributed Rodgers' voice to a half-man, half-antelope spirit they dubbed "Chemirocha".

When the song was released in February 1928 it became "a national phenomenon and generated an excitement and record-buying frenzy that no-one could have predicted.