This is not a funny story, so try not to laugh. We begin in the small community of Panther, Kentucky, not far from the mighty Ohio River, which separates Kentucky from Indiana. The date is April 1, 1922, and Jimmie Logsdon is born. It is a common, unremarkable birth, unattended by wise men, indeed, unattended by all save the child’s humble parents and himself. But a birth, nonetheless, it is. The father, a Methodist minister, offers his thanks to God.

Time passes Slowly, as in a dream, and as it does we shift tenses, tiring of the historical-present. Time passed slowly, we tell ourselves; yes it did, as in a dream, a dream that lasted many years.

Reverend Logsdon’s duties as a minister caused the Logsdon family to move frequently: from Panther to Bowling Green to Live Hill to Corbin, and finally to Ludlow, which is directly across the Ohio from Cincinnati. Jimmie graduated from Ludlow High in the spring of 1940. In the fall of that year, he married his first wife, a girl named Evelyn.

In 1944, 22-year-old Jimmie Logsdon decided to save America from the Nazis, and he enlisted in the Air Force. He was sent to an electronics School in Madison, Wisconsin, then stationed in Texas, where he was put to work as a lineman, repairing damaged B-17’s. Two years later, in 1946, the Nazis having been put in their place, Logsdon was released from the Air Force. He returned to Kentucky, arid opened a radio shop in La Grange, about 70 miles south of Cincinnati. In addition to selling and repairing radios, Logsdon sold records, which he bought from Jimmie Skinner, a Cincinnati distributor and two-bit country singer. Young Logsdon had until now not been too involved in music, but listening to the hillbilly and blues records that he sold at his store inspired him to buy a guitar. He found one for $11.95 at Abe Davis’s Pawnshop in Louisville.

I told you that this wasn’t funny. I forgot to tell you that it wasn’t Interesting, either.

In the spring of 1948, Jimmie Logsdon began singing and strumming his $11.95 guitar before the WLOU microphone in Louisville. In 1950 hp was given his own daily 15-minute program. Hank Williams was the sensation of the hillbilly nation at the time, and Jimmie Logsdon idolized him, even though Hank was younger than he. He listened constantly to Hank’s records, especially the primitive rockers such as “Rootie Tootie,” and it got to the point where his own voice was often mistaken for Hank’s by the folks out there in WLOU radioland.

In 1951 Logsdon hired a guitarist, Howard Whitehead, and a fiddler, Lonnie Pierce, to back him on club dates. Not (long after forming this trio, Logsdon cut his first record. Financed by a Louisville business^ man named Art Rhodes and recorded In Cincinnati with the help of Jimmie Skinner, “It’s All Over But The Shouting,” released on the -Harvest label, was a song that Logsdon has written about fighting with broads. He played the record on his own WLOU radio program, thus distinguishing himself as the only disc-jockey possessing foresight iri the matter of the promising career of Jimmie Logsdon. ...

He left WLOU in 1952 to become senior announcer for the competing station, WINN. In the fall of that year, Logsdon was booked to open a show for Hank Williams at the Louisville Municipal Auditorium. Hank, who when, at the age of 29, living in his final months, was greatly impressed by Logsdon, and when he returned to Nashville he told Paul Cohen, who ran Decca Records in that city, that Logsdon should be given a contract to record.

Logsdon began recording for Decca in November, 1952. His first release on the label being “I Want , To Be Mama’d”— which, these many years later, still stands as one of the finest of country music's many Oedipal love songs. His work for Decca, all of which was recorded at the Tulane Hotel in Nashville, was predominantly composed of country songs like those sung by his idol, Hank the Great. (Hank died on January 1, not long after Logsdon began recording for Decca. A few weeks later, Logsdon wrote and cut a tribute called “Hank Williams Sings The Blues No More.” On many of his subsequent, recordings, Logsdon used Hank’s old band, the Drifting Cbwboys, to back him up.) But a good many of his Decca records were lurid rockabilly or boogie tunes, which perfectly suited his bluesy, dissipated voice. The best of these were “Let’s Have A Happy Tirne” (co-written with Vic McAlpin, who collaborated frequently with Hank Williams), “Midnight Boogie,” and a version of the Crowley, Louisiana, swamp shuffle “Good Deal Lucille.” But, try as he might with straight country or rockabilly, Jimmie Logsdon could not score a hit, and Decca dropped him in early 1955.

Later that year, he cut two records for Randy Wood’s Dot label, the best side of which, “Midnight Blues,” received a good deal of airplay around Nashville but failed to break. Jimmie Logsdon was on the skids. His career, which had never sreally been much to write home about, seemed to be dead. His wife was divorcing him. He, like his late idol, was fast becoming a pill-degenerate and a drunk. In 1956 he entered a hospital to overcome -his weaknesses, and he stayed in that hospital for six long months.

He recorded again in 1957, singing into a portable tape machine in his fiddler’s bedroom, while the fiddler played a maraca—actually a baby‘•bottle warmer filled with beans—behind him. The two songs he cut were released by Starday, a company not known for its high standards of technical excellence.

Later in 1957, under the name of Jimmie Lloyd, he cut two singles for Roulette. One .of these sides, “I Got A Rocket In My Pocket,” not only went on to become one of the most sought-after records in rockabilly |history, but also inspired Iggy Pop to become the new Sinatra. Unfortunately for Jimmie Logsdon, it did little else.

He returned to Louisville in 1959, taking a job as a disc-jockey at WCKY, where he remained until 1964. In 1963 he cut a handful of records' for King in nearby Cincinnati, but for the most part they were corny country-pop fare, such as “Mother’s Flower Garden.”

After 1964, Logsdon worked for several other radio stations, in Kentucky and in Alabama, recording occasionally for small, barely-there labels such as Jewel in Mt. Pleasant, Ohio, and Clark County in his home state.

He quit disc-jockeying in 1972, and, since 1973, has dong no recording, but has earned his living working for the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

Here, coming fully round in both tense and geography, bur little story ends. We have learned much—something, at least— and spent no time in idle laughter. Rocket in his pocket, indeed.