When music critic Abbe Niles heard the Blue Yodel recordings released by Jimmie Rodgers in 1928 "he was impressed by how distinctively black Rodgers's Blue Yodel recordings sounded, yodeling and all." In his opinion Rodgers was a "white man gone black". In his 1928 record review column, writing under the heading "White man singing black songs," Niles acknowledged that Rodgers's first Blue Yodel had "started the whole epidemic of yodeling blues that now rages – though Clarence Williams wrote a good one five years ago." Niles went on to advise his readers to add race records to their collections saying, "Listening to race records is nearly the only way for white people to share the Negroes' pleasures without bothering the Negroes."