Yodel-Ay-Ee-Oooo

The Secret History of Yodeling Around the World

Bart Plantenga

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136716720
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Etnomusicologia

Yodel-Ay-Ee-Oooo is the first book to address the question: How did a centuries-old, Swiss mountain tradition make its way into American country music? Along the way, the reader discovers that yodeling is not just a Swiss thing--everyone from Central African pygmies, Nashville hunks-in-hats, avant-garde tonsil-twisters like Meredith Monk, hiphop stars De La Soul, and pop stars like Jewel have been known to kick back and release a yodeling refrain. Along the way, we encounter a gallery of unique characters, ranging from the legendary, such as country singer Jimmie Rodgers, to the definitely different, including Mary Schneider (the Australian Queen of Yodeling) who specializes in yodeling Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms, and the Topp Twins, a yodeling lesbian duo who employ the sound in their songs aimed at battling homophobia. The book is both a serious study of the history of yodeling around the world and a fun look at how this unique sound has worked its way into popular culture. Yodel-Ay-Ee-Oooo promises to be a classic for fans of music and popular culture.

melodic calls, unexpected wordless birds of sound ...

—Harold Courlander, Negro Folk Music USA

We call it yodeling because there is no other word for it.

—Nick Tosches, Where Dead Voices Gather

In the 1930s, the McKinney Sisters inquired singingly “Will there be any yodeling in heaven?” Because if there is yodeling in heaven, then heaven'll be a rollicking joint and all yodelers can rest assured they'll be at home there. And if all goes well, maybe Bob Wills can front the houseband, God being the manager and all—as long as they packed them in. The question is vaguely presumptuous and rhetorical, bearing a hint of ultimatum: If there's still no yodeling in heaven there'd better be—and soon …

But yodeling, especially the Tyrolean lederhosen variety with its frenetic variations in tone and pitch, its esophageal gymnastics, lies within cheap earshot of that potentially annoying Oktoberfest biergarten oompah music—jolly, mindless escapism—hoist another stein, stretch another octave. Conviviality found in brew-strained forays into falsetto. As Mark Twain sarcastically noted in A Tramp Abroad, “during the remainder of the day [we] hired the rest of the jodlers, at a franc apiece not to jodl anymore. There is somewhat too much of this jodling in the Alps.” And yet yodeling, even its crassest Vegas warbles, can aspire to instants of “higher” purpose, because to entertain is a noble distraction from the suffering that seeps into our mundane existences—sometimes the lightest of lyrics might carry the heaviest loads of import.

But maybe yodel heaven will be something closer to a solemn holy place. Because, indeed, there's another side to yodeling (which begins, cartographically and conveniently enough, right in the Swiss Alps), a soulful, incantatory side—steeped in the ancient cowherds’ prayer calls to appease valley gods. It's entangled in a vast psychogeographic conflation of yodel, geography, and spirituality whereby one's ability to extract its integral strains are difficult at best.

But aren't yodels just silly ululations that dart furiously back and forth somewhere between regular human voice and falsetto—what Christoph Wagner calls “low-down high-up vocal trickery.” Isn't this also the place where chord intervals are created allowing the yodeler to find harmony with him- or herself? Picture yodels bouncing off hillsides (or any reflective surface that offers echo effects) until there's any number of versions of your own voice harmonizing in midair. Voilà, witness your first instant of “recorded” sound—mountain valley as recording studio; air and memory being replaced by magnetic recording tape only deep into the 20th century.

IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS THE WORD

Where does the word “yodel” come from? Some Hauspartiers claim that jodel derives from the Latin word jubilare—to shout with joy. If anything, German yodeling fits that description—within a song structure context. Author-singer Ed Sanders has pointed out that “music comes partly out of joy … but also out of keening [a wailing lament for the dead], a yodel has a keening quality to it. And so in the Oi-joy spectrum it… lurks there with oi but it can be quite exultant and beautiful in the Bavarian and Swiss [context].”

Some have taken great offense with this Latin-roots hypothesis (or rehash of several authoritative-seeming sources). Whoever first merged jubilare with jodel may have been under the influence of religious studies where, indeed, the meaning of jubilation is defined as an “expression of joy,” which is not all that distant from the common definition of yodel as “to shout with joy” or a “type of wordless singing, joyous in nature … ,” in the words of Encyclopedia Britannica. So, the syncretic confusion is understandable. Max Pieter Baumann, writing in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, notes that the modern German verb jodeln, meaning “to yodel,” derives from the Middle High German jôlen as first seen in George Rhaw's Bicinia Gallica meaning “to call” or “to sing.”

Denis Guiet, a Canadian yodeler living in Switzerland, in a May 2002 email, notes:

any awake yodeler will explain the origins of the word, based quite simply on the sounds “vokalisiert” during its practice. Nothing more, nothing less. Much the same way that the English word “gurgle” descended from the sound it makes in a person's throat. The word “yodel” shows its origins most clearly in Berner-Deutsch where the word yodel is pronounced very close to “yo-du,” the two most common vocalized sounds used in … yodeling.

Swiss Yodel Choir from St. Gallen. Photo by G. Poschung. Permission by Schweiz Tourismus.

Johlen / jola derives from the interjection jo, according to Hans of the Brothers Grimm (1877). It gained a “d” because it was easier to bridge the “jo” and “len/la” with a “d,” which Baumann describes as the “vocal-physiological reasons.” Each region in Switzerland, for instance, has its own audio/linguistic needs, pronunciations, and psycho-geographical-acoustical profile. There are many spellings that try to represent the many subtle differences in pronunciation. And so from the (presumably) original jo in Switzerland we get joha, jôlen, jodln, jödele; while from the related juchui sound emerged juchzen, jutzen, yutzen, juuzä, juizä. Meanwhile, Austrian-German dialects produced luedeln, dudeln, jorlen, jaudeln, hegitzen; while from the German and Appenzell johla emerged: jola, zorren, zuaren, ruggussen, and länderen. The bibihendi is a yodel that sounds like a hen.

A YODEL IS A JODEL IS A JÜÜTZ?

So, what exactly is a yodel? Greeting? Warning? Joyous outburst? Pious ululation? Twain's “Tyrolese warbling”? Flashy pop chorus? Esophageal calisthenics? A cowherd's hootchie-cootchie come-on to the most udder endowed among his herd? Or is a yodel just some irritating “variation upon the tones of a jackass,” as Sir Walter Scott in 1830 opined?

At least three dictionaries offer “warble” as a synonym. The Wordsmyth online dictionary offers “quaver.” One dictionary claims yodels are mostly performed by men, another insists they're sung by both men and women. Defining a yodel is relatively easy: “Yodeling is understood as singing without text (yodel syllables), with continuous changes from chest to head voice and with frequent wide intervals.” It is especially easy if we accept the idea of the human body as musical instrument and as the prototype and shapely precursor for all future instruments. (Doesn't the cello look like a voluptuous woman—i.e., see Man Ray's photo “Violon d'Ingres 1924” with the cello's soundholes on the naked back of Kiki de Montparnasse.) The body also houses a built-in sound system. The difficult part comes later when we move beyond the raw basics and encounter the countless interpreters, each wanting to dress the yodel with his or her own defining characteristics.

The yodel, simply put, is most distinguishable from other types of vocalizations by its characteristic emphasis on the noise, that jolt of air, that occurs as the voice passes from bass or low chest voice to high head voice or falsetto—and vice versa. Yodeling is the decorative wordless passage that is forced across that chasm of spasming muscle and cartilage. The fact that the epiglottal stop (speed bump?) is emphasized gives it its distinct voice-print. Look at an oscilloscopic representation of a yodeler yodeling and an opera singer singing and you'll notice the difference. Other vocals may tinker with falsetto, trill, and vibrato, but it's that abrupt, almost rude, leap across the cavern of pitch that makes the yodel yodel. Simply put: no glottal jolt, no yodel. Everything else is secondary.

Baumann adds that a yodel is “singing without text or words,” with emphasis on the “play of timbres and harmonics … in the succession of individual, nonsensical vocal-consonant connections.” The leaps of pitch are often dramatic and can sometimes (contradictorily?) be characterized by a legato, or a smoothing over, of any interruption between the various notes. Or, more traditionally, the pitch burst is highlighted by the obvious and emblematic glottal leap over the sonic crevice between two notes. A genuine yodel, or juutz (various spellings), is wordless and not really “music” per se but an acoustical signal, mostly associated with cowherds communicating with one another and their herds. Ed Sanders calls it “a kind of homemade Morse code for people in the mountains.”

A good yodeler effortlessly climbs three octaves between low chest voice and high head voice. Yodelers, according to Baumann, do not exhale “in spurts … but rather gradually … through abdominal (or diaphragm) breathing, whereby the yodeled tone uses a deeply positioned larynx (‘yawning position’) and expanded resonance space.”

Picture two craftspeople in their respective studios: The yodeler is busy sharpening and accenting that transitional cleft between the two voices like some perverse post-teen trying to preserve the painful audio evidence of that boy-becomes-man rite of passage, the proverbial cracking voice. Meanwhile, the trained professional singer is busy sanding down the voice, polishing away that rough seam to the point of imperceptibility. Call it the portamento or, more onomatopoeically, glissando, which Western singers—regardless of their chosen genre—are taught. So, it's the Glottals versus the Glissandos. The yodel's glottal leap is emphasized like a valley emphasizes the characteristics that make a mountain a mountain.

This break is found all over the world. According to Oren Brown, a pioneer in the field of voice therapy, “you can hear it in African tribal music, a cowboy ‘yip,’ or in one person calling another in Tibet.” The falsetto is present in most human voices but, for the most part, the glottal pop or break is de-emphasized to the point of obliteration. Western singers consider it a problem like a pothole to a city's road department—something to fill in. Cowgal yodeler Liz Masterson observes: “One thing that makes good yodeling is to have the power in the high register and not have your lower note be a lot more powerful than your high note, where you kind of thin out…. It takes a long time just to practice those intervals to where you can train yourself to land right on the button.”

This break between chest and head voice constitutes “the release of one set of muscles...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Yodel-Festo
• 1 A Jodl Is a Jodel Is a Yodel?
• 2 Who Duh Lay Hee Who: Swiss Yodeling
• 3 Germany and Austria: Velvet Throats & Leather Pants
• 4 Where Yodels Are Jodeled Beyond the Alps
• 5 From India to Down Under
• 6 African Yodeling Beyond the Rainforest
• 7 Transmission and Transition
• 8 The Hillbillies Are Alive With Yodeling
• 9 A Cowboy’s Yip to a Yodel
• 10 Modern Epiglottal Frontiers
• 11 Be On Your Avant Garde, Yodelers!
• Appendix A Yodds and Ends: Yodeling Beyond Music
• Appendix B Selected Yodel-Ossary
• Appendix C Other Carriers of the Yodeling Bug
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index