The call of the hills

It’s late afternoon in the Austrian Alps. The air is cool and crisp. A young, fresh-faced maiden in regional dress climbs to the top of a grassy hill to call her cows home for the night. She takes a deep breath, cups one hand to her mouth and...

Yodelling, that distinctive vocal warbling which leaves no one indifferent, actually ranges much farther than you might think. While its exact origin is unknown, elements of it are found all across Central Asia, from Turkey to Kazakhstan to Mongolia. The emotive ‘sobs’ that embellish almost every phrase in Jewish klezmer music also have a yodelling quality, as do the spine-chilling cries of Berber singers in North Africa. In the world’s folk music, you encounter it just about everywhere you go.

Musically, it is characterized by sudden shifts from the lower ‘chest’ register to the ‘head’ or ‘falsetto’ range (not easy to do, especially for a man!). It’s an effect that can provoke a wide range of reactions in the listener, from astonishment to laughter to deep emotion. There is something primitive about it, something that echoes from deep within our shared cultural past. 

In the early 19^th century, immigrants from Germany and Austria would bring their unique cattle calls with them to North America’s Appalachian and Ozark Mountains, and before long yodelling contests were a common feature of rural life. Travelling ‘minstrel’ shows then spread it throughout the American South. By the end of the century, it was well-established as a vocal style in the popular folk songs of the day.

The real popularizer of the yodel, however, was ‘the Singing Brakeman’, Jimmie Rodgers, known today as ‘the Father of Country Music’. He really was a brakeman, on the New Orleans and Northeastern Railroad, and only became a professional singer when tuberculosis forced him to give up his railroad job in 1924. He was in fact a great synthesist of folk styles, infusing African-American blues structures with wistful, often humorous, lyrics about working class life. His warm, ‘everyman’ vocal style and, most strikingly, his masterful yodelling made him country music’s first superstar, at a time when the term ‘country music’ had not yet been invented. He was the first artist to sell a million records, the first to buy a Cadillac, and no doubt the first to have his name inlaid in mother-of-pearl on the fretboard of his guitar!

He was also the first to make a music video. Here he is in 1928, dressed in his brakeman’s uniform, singing one of his many hits. Better known as ‘T for Texas’, its official title is ‘Blue Yodel #1’.

Jimmie’s career didn’t last long. Tuberculosis was invariably fatal in those days, a fact he knew very well. He even wrote a strangely cheerful song about it, called ‘TB Blues’:

I been fightin’ like a lion / Looks like I’m goin’ to lose / ‘Cause there ain’t no man ever whipped the TB blues / (yodels:) I got the TEE-hee BEE-hee bloo-hoo-hoo-HOOs

He died in 1933, at the age of 37.

The yodelling craze continued into the 1940s, as much a part of mountain, or ‘hillbilly’, music as the fiddle or the banjo. Cowboy singers like Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and Patsy Montana were especially fond of it, while country swing artists like Bob Wills and folk singers like Woody Guthrie made use of it as well. But, as a wave of post-war migration brought more and more country people to the big cities, the popularity of the yodel began to fade. It was too much a reminder of rural life, at a time when a new, more urban style of country music was developing, with its now-classic subject matter of adultery, divorce, alcohol and prison. The yodel just didn’t seem to fit!

A late example is Hank Williams’ ‘Lovesick Blues’, recorded in 1949, a masterpiece of musical yodelling that would have made Jimmie Rodgers proud. The song was actually an updated version of a yodelling hit from 1922, but Hank made it his own. Here it is, sung by one of the greatest artists America has ever produced, in any medium. 

In the 1950s, yodelling disappeared from the country music scene – or did it? More precisely, it evolved into a subtle vocal device that would mark some of the era’s most popular singers. This was the slight ‘catch’ in the voice – yes, a quick leap up to the falsetto and back down again – that was employed to give an extra emotional kick to important syllables in the lyrics, much as those klezmer musicians had been doing for generations in their own music. 

No one did it quite as effectively as Patsy Cline, who used it to wring the maximum emotion from every heartbreaking lyric she sang. Listen for it in this clip of her doing what is now her most internationally famous song, Willie Nelson's 'Crazy'. (I don't know what to say about that headband, or the unfortunate placement of those Texas longhorns behind her head!) 
 

Country music’s first cousin, rock & roll, would also be haunted by the ghost of yodelling, especially in its early rockabilly incarnation. It’s hard to listen to Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis or Johnny Burnette and not hear the influence of Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams. Not to mention Roy Orbison, with his soaring three-octave range and pure country phrasing. And, while yodelling was never much part of the black music experience, at least one R&B vocalist (and what a vocalist!) would build his entire style on it. I’m talking about the great Aaron Neville. Here he is sometime in the 80s, singing his 1967 hit “Tell It Like It Is”. 

You would be hard-pressed to find even the shadow of a yodel on country music radio these days, except as the most artificial of gimmicks (because, yes, nostalgia sells, too). Apart from the trademark twangy guitars and sermonizing lyrics about family values and the ‘American way of life’, it all sounds pretty much like Top 40 radio – calculated, processed, dead as a doornail. Well, no use ranting about that. I don’t suppose anyone takes it seriously, anyway.

Ah yes – there was also that strange phenomenon that first appeared in the mid-80’s, I think, when it suddenly became fashionable for female pop artists to punctuate their delivery with random, inexplicable bursts of yodelling. Dolores O’Riordan of the Cranberries might have been the first, with ‘Zombie’, but Sinead O’Connor, Alanis Morissette and, of course, Shakira would take it to the heights of absurdity. You still hear it occasionally, but that seems to be dying out, too.

Auto-Tune, unfortunately, is still with us. You know, that dreadful electronic voice-warbling effect that has saturated the most commercial pop, dance and hip-hop music for the past 15 years or so? The kids can’t get enough of it – or so they want us to believe. In any case, it might as well be called Auto-Yodel, as it creates that same falsetto shift electronically, in a way no human voice ever could, so that the singer sounds like he or she is gurgling, drowning perhaps, on some distant planet with a dense, jelly-like atmosphere.

I’m not sure if Auto-Tune has been tried with cows yet, but just think what it could do for the milkmaids of the world. Another great advance for automation!

One last yodeller:

                                                                                     Magic Bob

                            research consultant:
Yodellin' Jim McVeigh