I Wish I Could Yodel

Well, doggone it, I sure wish I could yodel! Western music—to put a finer point on it—cowboy music, is not complete without yodeling. Maybe it’s because I grew up hearing Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, who always had a cowboy band at hand that could break into a set of western music between foiling the outlaws who were trying to steal the ranch. Roy and Gene would strike off into yodeling. Or maybe it’s because my home state of Mississippi is also the home state of Jimmy Rogers, who is credited with bringing yodeling to Western music. Before his hit song Blue Yodel hit the airwaves in 1923, yodeling was not in the Cowboy music repertoire, but before long, Roy and Gene were making the range ring with rapid-fire chest-head breaks.[1]

Thing is, I don’t know a single person of my acquaintance who, if they heard I had taken up yodeling, would say, “Well, it’s about time. Whatever took you so long? We always thought you would make a yodeler.” Moreover, I don’t even know a single yodeler; although my father-in-law was reputed to yodel a bit while singing to the accompaniment of his guitar. Guitar playing, singing country-western, and yodeling were not part of his professional persona, for he had made a preacher;[2] but he was a fan of Jimmy Rodgers, and grew up not all that far from Meridian, which was Rodgers’s home town. And would you believe—his name was Jimmy too.[3] Jimmy Lawrence, my wife’s father, was born in 1917, and was just 10 years old when Jimmy Rodgers’s “ Blue Yodel #1”—also known as “T for Texas”—was released, eventually selling a half-million copies. That was a huge number at the time.

When my wife’s grandparents had passed on and their belongings were parceled out, my wife retrieved a stack of very old Stamps-Baxter songbooks from the upper shelf in a closet in their house. Anyway, I am straying from my lament of being deficient when it comes to yodeling. In my youth I had some music training, even including voice lessons—that’s singing, in case you were never penned up in a music-program corral. Although I learned a bit about breath control, pitch, tone, diction, and phrasing, there was no instruction on yodeling.

Much later in life I took a notion to learn to play the violin. I rented one, and signed up for lessons from a fine man named John Ferguson I knew who taught part-time at the college where I worked. I would show up at his door once a week, just as a 9- or 10-year-old kid would be finishing up her lesson, and I would go in and sit down in the same chair and open the same music and go to sawing away. This went on for two years, and I actually made some progress, but couldn’t help but notice the young kids far outstripped me in that time. Then we moved and I lost my teacher, and just never picked it up again.

Why I bring that up is that—at least the way I played—there could be some resemblance between playing the violin and yodeling. I suspect that had I spent a like amount of time and effort in learning to yodel, I could have become about as proficient at yodeling as I was at playing the violin. I also suspect—even more strongly—that the effect on my wife would have been approximately the same. She had been much more highly trained in music and has a fine ear for pitch, and I imagine any efforts to get my vocal cords to switch from one register to another would have elicited similar feedback as my efforts to get the bow from the G string to the A string without an ear-traumatizing shriek.  Well, I don’t think I need to spell that out anymore.

All of this leaves me no nearer to realizing my dream of yodeling, but I can imagine why so many actual cowboys and cowgirls have real advantages in becoming proficient in the art of yodeling:

1. Acreage – From the “Miles and Miles of Texas” all the way to the Big Sky Country, that home on the range where the buffalo roam and the deer and the antelope play provides plenty of space to get plumb out of earshot of anyone else so you can practice your yodeling in peace. Suburban and urban locales are too crowded, and where ever anyone cuts loose with a yo de lay dee hoo, one of two things is going to happen: either a crowd will gather—and not necessarily a friendly crowd either—or the yodeler will be singing a duet with approaching sirens, because someone is going to call the law.[4]

2. Horses – to get out into the middle of the required acreage it helps to have a horse. I guess, in theory, a person could walk out into the middle of a prairie and find a suitable venue for practicing yodeling, but everyone knows a cowboy afoot is too sad a creature to do anything like yodeling. Of course, cow people are usually on a horse on their way to doing something—rounding up cattle, checking fences, counting calves, and so on, and in the midst of those pursuits you might suddenly look around and see that you are a ways and heck and gone from anyone else, so you seize the opportunity to do some yodeling. Now, about horses, it takes a certain temperament in a horse for it to endure having a yodeler on its back without instantly launching said yodeler into the firmament.[5]  

3. Cows – The authentic activities that involve riding horseback also involve cattle. I mean, without cows, what is it that needs to be rounded up—prairie dogs? Moreover, whether it’s true or not, cows are reputed to like being sung to. Keeps them calm when they are bedded down at night. That’s why the nightriders—those cowboys circling the herd at night–sing to them, and any night-riding troubadour with a facility for doing so is going to break into yodeling now and then. You might be wondering why it is that yodeling doesn’t spook the cattle into a stampede. The reason is that cows are accustomed to hearing coyotes and—not having finely trained musical ears—they have a hard time distinguishing between a cowboy yodeling and a pack of yowling coyotes. Of course, sometimes a herd will spook at the sound of too exuberant a burst of yodeling, which is why a good many cowboys are itinerant.[6]

After saying all this, it comes to me now that if I really want to learn to yodel I should also learn to play a guitar–at least a few chords. I have noticed that most cowboy yodelers like to have a guitar in their hands when they are yodeling. For me, if the yodeling doesn’t work out, maybe the guitar playing will. If the guitar doesn’t work out, I can stick to yarning. That only takes hot air, and most folks will say I’m okay there.

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[1] Not everyone agrees that Jimmy Rodgers was responsible for the advent of yodeling in cowboy music. A sizeable number of western scholars hold that yodeling entered cowboy singing culture when a cowboy named Wendell Cartwright (no relation to the Ponderosa Cartwrights) and some of his pards (pards is what cowboys called their BFF’s) were watering at a snowmelt creek and his foot slipped on an rock and he tumbled head over heels into a pool of icy water. When his head broke the surface, according to one of his pards, he was the one who launched the authentic Blue Yodel. Other cowboys on the scene were not able to offer testimony because they were—as folks say now—ROTFLOL.

[2] “Made a preacher” is Southern-speak for “became a preacher,” a vernacular formulation used to comment on a child’s career or vocational attainment.

[3] My wife’s dad got his love of music from his father, Joel Lawrence, who was a fiddle player and devotee of religious music in the Sacred Harp and Stamps-Baxter tradition. The thing was, these two staunch Baptist men were married to even stauncher Baptist women, who had little toleration for what they saw as “the Devil’s music.” Therefore, for their children or grandchildren to ever hear either of these two patriarchs singing and playing the music of their hearts was a rarity, requiring almost a clandestine performance.

[4]Yodeling is a world-wide form of vocal expression, from goatherds of the Alps to herdsmen in Africa, folks beset by solitude, distance, and maybe a good dose of boredom, have found themselves emitting this alternative vocalization. As far as I know, yodeling has originated among rural peoples. 

[5] Homer Bledsoe, of Ranch Springs, Utah, tried to test the hearing of a string of horses he had one winter, but he was not able to find headphones that would remain in place when the horses shook their heads. Eventually, the horses displayed hostility even when he approached the corral with an armload of headphones.

[6] It was only in 1976 that the Hiring Office of the Western Cattleman’s Organization of Wyoming (HOWCOW) added the question, “Have you ever been let go from an outfit over suspicions of starting a stampede by yodeling?” to the Common Application for Ranch Hands.