PROFESSOR EXPERT ON JIMMIE RODGERS, CREATOR OF COUNTRY MUSIC

English professor Nolan Porterfield is the recognized authority on a subject few of his students have ever heard of, even those swaggering through the halls in Garth Brooks T-shirts.

That subject is Jimmie Rodgers, whom music aficionados often call "the Father of Country Music."

A longtime professor at Southeast Missouri State University, Porterfield is the author of "Jimmie Rodgers: The Life and Times of America's Blue Yodeler." A revised paperback edition of his 1979 book has just been published by the University of Illinois Press.

The revisions are minor. The book remains the definitive work on the man credited with creating in the 1920s and 1930s a new category of entertainer: country western singer.

"When he hit the scene he was strikingly new," Porterfield says. "He was as strikingly different as Michael Jackson."

Porterfield writes that Rodgers "wasn't much of a musician couldn't read a note, keep time, play the `right' chords, or write lyrics that fit. All he could do was reach the hearts of millions of people around the world, and lift them up."

Possessed with a "muscular personality," Rodgers considered himself an entertainer rather than an artist or political activist like Woody Guthrie. Porterfield notes that he wore business suits on stage and had unexplained sex appeal for a balding, tubercular man who at most might have wiggled his big ears and whose trademark was a yodel, not a croon.

Maybe, the professor suggests, it was because "his songs said, `I've been there before and I know what I can do.'"

Rodgers, who'd worked as a railroad brakeman, sang about trains and traveling and introduced the notion of love into the blandness of what was then called "hillbilly music." He also injected a shot of blues. ("Got me a pretty mama, got me a bulldog too; my pretty mama don't love me, but my bulldog do.")

Soon, most everybody who had a radio or phonograph knew "T for Texas" and "In the Jailhouse Now." Rodgers recorded 110 songs in all and played often to sold-out audiences in a spectacular six-year career cut short, as was his life, by tuberculosis. He died at 35.

Cowboy singer Gene Autry's first recordings were Jimmie Rodgers covers. Hank Snow also recorded Rodgers' songs.

"Old-timers say he was as big as Bing Crosby and Elvis Presley," Porterfield remarks. In fact, Rodgers sold a million records before his contemporary Crosby did.

Thanks no doubt in part to Porterfield's scholarship, Rodgers hasn't been completely forgotten. TNN, a country music channel, will soon broadcast a special dedicated to his music. He's especially well-known abroad. Porterfield has given a Rodgers lecture in the hometown of the Beatles.

His music is reissued periodically. In 1988, Porterfield was nominated for a Grammy for the liner notes he wrote for a new Smithsonian compilation.

Rodgers' songs also have been newly recorded by stars now much better known: Tanya Tucker and Crystal Gayle, for instance. Emmylou Harris, Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt recorded one of his hobo songs on their collaboration album. Idiosyncratic singer-guitarist Leon Redbone is a fan.

Many of today's country music stars are at least as hugely successful as Rodgers was in his day, but to Porterfield, much of their music lacks his authenticity.

"Pop music has disappeared," he says. "...Bad country music has filled the gap. It's country music for people who hate country music."

Growing up in Texas in the 1940s, Porterfield listened to reissued Jimmie Rodgers records and records by a lot of other people who were the real thing. His big heroes were Ernest Tubb, "Lefty" Frizzell and Hank Williams. "They're like William Faulkner and Hemingway are to literary people," he says.

At 4 p.m. today in Crisp Hall's Dempster Auditorium, Porterfield will read from a short story in progress titled "A Thousand Unknown Facts About Country Music." He is also at work on a biography of John Lomax, a folk song collector and archivist who "discovered" "Home on the Range" in a field recording.

The reading is one in a yearly series of events presented by the university's Cultural Programs Committee. It is free and open to the public.