Yodeling and Meaning in American Music

By Timothy E. Wise

Timothy E. Wise presents the first book to focus specifically on the musical content of yodeling in our culture. He shows that yodeling serves an aesthetic function in musical texts. A series of chronological chapters analyzes this musical tradition from its earliest appearances in Europe to its incorporation into a range of American genres and beyond. Wise posits the reasons for yodeling's changing status in our music. How and why was yodeling introduced into professional music making in the first place? What purposes has it served in musical texts? Why was it expunged from classical music? Why did it attach to some popular music genres and not others? Why does yodeling now appear principally at the margins of mainstream tastes?

To answer such questions, Wise applies the perspectives of critical musicology, semiotics, and cultural studies to the changing semantic associations of yodeling in an unexplored repertoire stretching from Beethoven to Zappa. This volume marks the first musicological and ideological analysis of this prominent but largely ignored feature of American musical life.

Maintaining high scholarly standards but keeping the general reader in mind, the author examines yodeling in relation to ongoing cultural debates about singing, music as art, social class, and gender. Chapters devote attention to yodeling in nineteenth-century classical music, the nineteenth-century Alpine-themed song in America, the Americanization of the yodel, Jimmie Rodgers, and cowboy yodeling, among other topics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Oct 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781496805812

Timothy E. Wise

Timothy E. Wise, Manchester, United Kingdom, was born and reared in Texas and is a senior lecturer in musicology at the University of Salford, England. A member of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, he has published work in Radical Musicology, American Music, the Musical Quarterly, Popular Music, and the Journal of American Folklore.

Book preview

Introduction

YODELING IN MUSIC AND IN DISCOURSE ABOUT MUSIC

YODELING HAS LONG BEEN AN IMPORTANT ELEMENT IN AMERICAN popular music singing styles. The practice has been cultivated since the early nineteenth century, when it began to be well known and has since enjoyed an unbroken tradition, appearing in all forms of American popular entertainment: minstrelsy, vaudeville, ragtime, blues, music theatre, operetta, country, jazz, pop—virtually everything.

Yet despite its long history and wide dispersal, yodeling, generally speaking, has a relatively low status in our music making. While it may seem omnipresent, it tends to find its most comfortable home in areas outside music’s mainstream: in hillbilly or in cowboy music, for example. And over the twentieth century it has regularly been used for or strongly associated with humor. In film, for example, one may think of Jessie the Yodeling Cowgirl in Toy Story 2, of Snow White dancing with the dwarves to their yodeled Silly Song, of Julie Andrews yodeling The Lonely Goatherd in The Sound of Music, or perhaps of Martian heads exploding at the sound of Slim Whitman’s yodeling in Mars Attacks!

Beyond that, and despite its obvious continuing presence in our culture, yodeling seems dogged by a variety of negative associations. Even the mere mention of the word yodeling can provoke strong reactions. I say this simply because of the frequent reaction I get when I tell people about my research subject: aside from actual yodelers and specialists in musicology, ethnomusicology, and related subjects, people typically respond with smiles, smirks, even belly laughs, but almost always with some degree of incredulity (even some academics who should know better). Many people just cannot take yodeling seriously.

One question permeating this study is why yodeling is so often dismissed as an amusing irrelevance. Has that always been the case? Or has yodeling somehow been made to appear ridiculous to many people? What kinds of things have contributed to its lowly status in American music? To me, the answers to such questions are to be found in the meanings attaching to yodeling. Put simply, the question is: what does yodeling communicate in its various musical contexts? My starting point in this book is the premise that the connotations of yodeling—as opposed to the practice itself—prevent its wholesale acceptance, and that to understand those connotations, the subject must be approached in terms of the kinds of meanings yodeling suggests.

The subject of this book, therefore, is the semantic coding that inevitably develops in the construction and use of musical gestures. I focus on yodeling in musical texts in order to explore some of the processes by which innocent sonic gestures are endowed with meanings.¹ Toward this end, I investigate yodeling as a technical device singers choose to employ that, at the same time on another level, functions as a signifier within a given musical framework; in other words, within the context of other musical signifiers, yodeling communicates something rather specific: verbal or visual associations or affective states. My intention is to investigate how yodeling has functioned within the sonic codes of American music and how attitudes toward it have changed since its introduction in the early nineteenth century. My focus is specifically on American popular music genres because the aim here is to understand yodeling’s meanings exclusively within the American context. But because the yodeling that was introduced into American music is of European origin, and because over the twentieth century other forms of yodeling from other cultures have mixed in with the expressive techniques available to contemporary singers, our story will necessarily take in a broad range of musical practices over a long period of time.

In his History of European Folk Music, Jan Ling quotes an amusing anecdote originally appearing in Max Peter Baumann’s German-language study of the yodel. The story concerns an Alpine peasant and his singing a Kuhreihen, which is the name for various alphorn melodies that are sometimes yodeled (Kuhreihen are discussed in detail in chapter 2):

One of these people had come to Paris and was taken to the opera where he was so carried away by the trills of the castrato that he was rude enough to state that this song was far too feminine. He put his fingers into his ears, raised his voice in a Kuhreihen and soon out-shouted the opera singer entirely. Louis the Great and his court were greatly moved by all the intricacies of this song, and asked the singer to perform in the royal garden, but the Swiss man refused, claiming that he was a free man, the equal of the King, and only sang when the spirit moved him.²

This little story illustrates some important themes associated with our topic: class division and gender, liberty and identity, musical hierarchies and artistic status, and indeed the symbolic function of music. The kind of social and ideological division illustrated in this passage is apparent throughout the story of yodeling in American popular music. Recognition of that division is a starting point for the exploration of yodeling’s meaning in our music.

Practically anyone who wants to can yodel. That is because we all have voice boxes, and if these are in reasonable working order, it is possible to yodel. Indeed, children frequently do it when they yell or scream, and adults commonly break into falsetto when laughing. The simple fact that everyone can do it explains why there is evidence of yodeling in so many different cultures.³ It is a natural vocal phenomenon. Even dogs and wolves often yodel when they bark or call. Since it is natural and so prevalent, one may ask why yodeling does not appear more often in our music. After all, most music the world over involves the voice. And similarly, while we can find examples of yodeling in all kinds of genres of American music, in only a few has it assumed a central role, and even in those—for example, country music—it has gone in and mostly out of fashion.

So this book poses the simple question: what is it about yodeling that has excluded it from the center of our music making—unlike the voice itself, which has virtually always been considered the primary musical instrument regardless of culture?

Music is a discursive practice. By this I mean that when people engage with music, whether they are playing it, listening to it, or simply thinking about it, they participate in and respond to a semiotic meaning-making system of sound. Through the selection and structuring of sounds, musical ideas and aesthetic stances are generated, reinforced, and reproduced. Indeed, music is one of humanity’s most important technologies or inventions for the production, perpetuation, and understanding of meaning. I use the term technology because music involves, among other things, tunings, the working out of systems of intervals and of rhythms, the construction of instruments, and aesthetic systems which encode sounds with significances. The training of the voice to sing comfortably and efficiently is itself a kind of technology. The focus in this book is on the meaning system within the musical sounds. When composers or singers within the European tradition consciously began using a hitherto unknown effect such as yodeling in their professionally performed and published music, they were at the same time coding it for meaning within their already established modes of making music. In this way music is a discursive practice.

At the same time, the making of music is itself the subject of various commentaries, spoken, written, blogged, and more. Even when we simply think about music, we may be asking ourselves whether we like it or not, whether it is good or not, or what it is about it that moves us or otherwise. Music is discussed, written about, theorized, critiqued, explained, praised, castigated, or ridiculed by virtually everyone with any interest in it. If people in our culture listen to music, they are likely also to talk about it. That talk, no matter what form it takes, whether professional or informal, ignorant or informed, is a discourse about music, a discourse in which attitudes toward the music, aesthetic stances, and cultural values—no matter how unsystematically developed they may be—are worked out and articulated. In a sense, the subject explored here is the convergence of these two mutually influencing activities: on one hand yodeling as a musical discursive practice, and on the other verbal, critical commentary of various types about that music. With yodeling as my focal point—as a thema within both musical discourse and discourse about music—I explore the device in music performed and published in the United States in order to trace the changing cultural position of yodeling both in the practice of music and in contemporaneous discourses about music. What continually struck me throughout my research was the fact that yodeling is barely mentioned in critical debates—particularly in the nineteenth century, when it was introduced and popularized in professional music making. One might get the feeling that it never happened were the sheet music evidence not so abundant. This absence in the discourse about music is interesting in itself and can be interpreted in two ways: one, that yodeling was so little regarded that no one deigned to mention it; two, that it was so ordinary, so common, that few bothered to comment on it. In a later chapter this idea receives greater attention.

As will become apparent in chapters 2 and 3, yodeling was introduced as a foreign element into European singing styles. One of our first tasks is to try to understand just what the relationship of yodeling to singing is. That automatically takes us into the realm of discourse, since it involves a simple question like: what is singing?

Notions of what constitutes singing are historically and culturally determined, just as they are for music itself. For our discussion, it is important to realize that European singing styles in the early nineteenth century (when our story begins) generally speaking did not involve yodeling. Simply put, within the European tradition singing is usually conceptualized as involving words rhythmically intoned on discrete pitches corresponding to our scales. If hearers judge the notes sharp or flat of the expected pitch, or if the rhythms fail to obey our concept of metrical division of the beat, then the singing is likely to be considered poor, amateurish, or unmusical. Yodeling the notes is as unlikely to be expected as shrieking or panting them out. Even now, after over two hundred years of assimilation, singing and yodeling appear in the main to be two different concepts in the English-speaking world. That is one reason why people who yodel are usually called yodelers (or singers who yodel) and not simply singers: the European concept of singing by and large excludes it.

This fact also explains why histories of singing and singing manuals rarely, if ever, refer to it. For example in the recent Cambridge History of Singing, yodeling is mentioned only incidentally in two footnotes, more or less proving that it is alien to European classical music orthodoxy.⁴ Nor is yodeling mentioned in the Cambridge Companion to Singing, presumably because it is not considered singing.⁵ The same can be said of the entry on singing in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Even in Richard Middleton’s entry Singing in the Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, yodeling is mentioned as an extreme form of singing, grouped with yelling, growling, and grunting.⁶

But when we compare other cultures’ concepts of singing with ours, we find a huge range of other vocal devices alien to our received ideas. Those readers familiar with the sound of Peking opera, Tuvan throat singing, or heavy metal will know exactly how different and indeed strange such singing can seem on first encounter. But more to the point, it is the idea of just what constitutes singing that is important for the distinctiveness of those, and many other, forms of music making.

One of the glories of American popular music is the fact that is has been so enriched through the influence of other traditions in which the singing voice is quite differently conceived. Among these other cultures, African ones are particularly important for our music and for any discussion of yodeling. African singing practices are very different from European practice. With specific reference to vocal production, Samuel Floyd in his book The Power of Black Music mentions tongue clicks, suction stops, explosive endings, throaty gurgles as aspects of African singing techniques.⁷ None of these occurs in conventional European singing. Thus, when such features as these combine with singing that derives from the European approach, an inevitable strangeness occurs. Moreover, questions regarding the validity of the approach and its place in the hierarchy of our musical practice likewise arise.

In the course of our story, we will see many additions beyond simply yodeling to the received approach to singing, and with these additions come aesthetic positions, whether loudly voiced or quietly enforced, about the value of the new style of music. With regard to African singing styles, early commentators on the music of African Americans on the southern plantations frequently remarked on the singing of the blacks because it was so different from what they were accustomed to. The preface to Slave Songs of the United States, originally published in 1867, is one of the earliest examples of commentary on the singing of the African slaves. The compilers of that collection quote a letter written to Dwight’s Journal of Music, of November 8, 1862, that stated: It is difficult to express the entire character of these negro ballads by mere musical notes and signs. The odd turns made in the throat, and the curious rhythmic effect produced by single voices chiming in at different irregular intervals, seem almost as impossible to place on the score as the singing of birds or the tones of an Aeolian Harp.⁸

Whether or not the odd turns made in the throat is a reference to the laryngeal mechanism that produces yodeling (discussed in chapter 1), the phrase points up the difference in the production of musical sound. And although the description just quoted is rather vague, it clearly indicates that the white observers were struck by the differences from their own musical practices. The authors also note that the black singers seem not infrequently to strike sounds that cannot be precisely represented by the gamut and abound in ‘slides from one note to another.’⁹

In recordings of country or folk blues we hear all sorts of vocal shadings of tone that are characteristic of African American singing. Moaning, growling, speaking, falsetto, and yodeling, as well as various degrees of enunciation all are typical of the blues style. From the perspective of European practice, these additional kinds of vocalization tend to be regarded as external, para-musical; yet within the music of this tradition, they are style features of the singing itself.

Hawaiian singing styles typically feature yodeling as well. How and when yodeling entered Hawaiian practice is unclear, although scholars have noted evidence in the indigenous chanting of changing vocal register which may have contributed to that island’s contemporary practices, and by the 1880s falsetto singing was well established and popular in Hawaiian music.¹⁰ It has also been reported that the influential musician Henri Berger, who helped establish the Royal Hawaiian Band, used yodeling to teach his Hawaiian musicians, which may also have served the incorporation of this common feature into their singing.¹¹ Additionally, when Spanish vaqueros were invited by King Kamehameha III in the 1830s to teach Hawaiians how to deal with the ever-increasing number of cows in the islands, the Spanish cowboys made a profound impact on the indigenous Hawaiians by introducing the guitar and (presumably) their yodeling, although there is no documentary evidence of the latter.¹²

Thus we find clear examples of parallel developments in American music: yodeling occurring in three separate traditions—the imported Alpine, the forcibly imported African, and the later, also unfortunately forcibly annexed Hawaiian styles. These unrelated musical practices began to mingle in American music making during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is not always easy or even possible to trace who influenced whom, but a survey of yodeling in American musical history provides plenty of evidence indicating shared repertoires and mixing of techniques.

So one problem in locating the yodel within our music making is simply determining its relationship to our predominating concept of singing. Is it alien, or is it integral? In the case of European singing, it is the former. But in the case of African or Hawaiian singing, the latter (although with regard to Hawaiian music, falsetto and yodel were not likely indigenous, but haole, that is, non-Hawaiian; yet they had been fully assimilated into their music by the time it began to have an impact on mainland America’s music).¹³ The point is simply that, while singing may be universal, the way people understand or conceptualize it is culturally determined; thus what constitutes singing differs from culture to culture, shaped by local discourses about music and prevailing cultural hierarchies. American music, which for the most part is a continuation of European cultural practice, initially accepted yodeling as a foreign element. But through time and the mixing with other influences, particularly African, our popular music has very slowly assimilated yodeling to the point that now it goes unnoticed in many popular music styles. In short, it has been fully absorbed and is now a style feature of many American popular genres, although for other reasons explored later, it may not be recognized as yodeling.

This book is the first to focus on both the musical content of the yodeling and the semantic aspects of that content in American popular song. Following this approach, I seek to elucidate yodeling’s status in our music making. How and why was the folk yodel introduced into professional music making in the first place? What purposes did it serve in those earliest musical texts? Why was yodeling eventually expunged from so-called classical music? How and why has yodeling’s status changed since its incorporation into English-language popular music? Why does it remain on the periphery despite its many performers, fans, and advocates?

To answer such questions, this book explores the changing uses and semantic associations of yodeling in a wide range of musical contexts; this necessitates a radical approach that cuts across genres and the taste cultures they represent, an effort that presents for the first time a musicological and ideological analysis of this prominent but largely ignored feature of American musical life. In pursuit of answers to such questions, the yodel serves as a barometer both of taste and of attitudes toward musical and cultural values. As such, this is the first exploration of yodeling in analytical and theoretical terms, focusing on what Philip Tagg calls non-verbal, connotative levels of communication.¹⁴ My aim is not to interpret the music per se, since that is an entirely subjective matter, but rather to reflect on the music from semiotic, historical, and cultural perspectives in order to observe various ways music has incorporated yodeling and to what ends, and, crucially, how ideas evoked by or associated with the music have changed through time. To a very large extent, I contend, it was the connotations—what the yodel signified—that lost appeal in the nineteenth century. As a result, the signifier itself—the yodeling voice—became imperiled within the prevailing taste codes. Later a new kind of yodeling found a new kind of artistic credibility, returning yodeling, about a hundred years after its first occurrence in American music, once again to prominence. But later again, this time for different reasons associated with another new sensibility, yodeling once more was edged out of the mainstream to the margins where it has remained.

While the lines of transmission are not always apparent, musical devices move freely within popular genres and flow into popular music from other sources. Musical ideas pass from one kind of performance practice into others, often quite unrelated, and find ever-new uses for themselves. Drawing on terminology that originated in the work of Levi-Strauss, we can regard this as the bricolage thema applied to music. The bricolage thema can be illustrated by this passage from Darwin:

I have now nearly finished this volume, which is perhaps too lengthy. It has, I think, been shown that the Orchideae exhibit an almost endless diversity of beautiful adaptations. When this or that part has been spoken of as adapted for some special purpose, it must not be supposed that it was originally always formed for this sole purpose. The regular course of events seems to be, that a part which originally served for one purpose, becomes adapted by slow changes for widely different purposes…. Although an organ may not have been originally formed for some special purpose, if it now serves for this end, we are justified in saying that it is specially adapted for it. On the same principle, if a man were to make a machine for some special purpose, but were to use old wheels, springs, and pulleys, only slightly altered, the whole machine, with all its parts, might be said to be specially contrived for its present purpose. Thus throughout nature almost every part of each living being has probably served, in a slightly modified condition, for diverse purposes, and has acted in the living machinery of many ancient and distinct specific forms.—Charles Darwin, The Various Contrivances by Which Orchids are Fertilised by Insects (2nd ed., 1877)

The continuing use of yodeling is a good example of this process. Innovation may not be introduced very often in popular music, but once it has been, performers are quick to capitalize upon it. A novel device may be adopted by others and put to a different use with a different connotation. Tagg has written of this process with regard to the Hawaiian guitar style. Originally developed by Hawaiian musicians, this guitar technique was appropriated by early country musicians. In this way, what was originally a metonym of one style (Hawaiian) became a style indicator for another (country) and lost its Hawaiian connotations in the process.¹⁵ The use of the yodeled voice follows a similar pattern. Originally employed as a metonym for the Alpine herding culture, it eventually lost those connotations, acquiring new ones in various new contexts. Both these examples demonstrate the fact that once a technique or device is introduced into music, it can spread and find a role in other styles. We observe this process repeatedly in occurrences of yodeling in American music. Originally employed as a musical device to suggest the Alps, as yodeling moves into other genres it ceases to function in quite the same way, finding new meanings.

I use the term musical device to describe yodeling. By device I mean an isolatable expressive gesture intentionally added into a musical texture, and hence a signifier within that context. But yodeling is unlike other types of musical devices for the reason that its origin was external to music—at least in Europe, as I have already pointed out. This is an important point. Professional singing styles in European practice generally did not involve breaking between vocal registers for specific effects. On the other hand, yodeling was a folk practice that began to be appropriated into European music at the end of the eighteenth century for definite purposes. Yodeling was thus exterior to that music, foreign to it, and therefore prominent in its new context because it was exotic. This is what I mean when I state that originally yodeling was external to Western art music practice. Its inclusion necessarily brought a set of associations triggered by its very difference.

By way of contrast, consider a musical trill (translation of the German Pralltriller). Trilling is a specifically musical device, and it has significance primarily and fundamentally within the parameters of a musical discourse. The same can be said of fugue or fuzz-tone or triple-tonguing or back beat. These concepts lack a life of their own outside their musical contexts—they depend upon music, probably would not exist except for music. But yodeling was different—originally at least, and in the European and American context: it was a folk practice exterior to music, borrowed into it, capable of blending with it and being indistinguishable from it. And for a long period its potency derived from its exotic character. But eventually yodeling lost the sense of something coming from another source as it was completely absorbed into the practice of professional music making, as the discussion which follows illustrates. And once absorbed, it could move freely among various genres as a novel expressive gesture. This explains the way I use device in the sense of both a technique and a resource, one that is used because it is expressive or significant in some way.

My discussion focuses on a single feature—yodeling—that previously had no meaning within a communicative system but was arbitrarily selected to become significant by the adopting culture. I draw on semiotics, specifically that area known as semantics, which deals with meanings, in order to explore the nature of the significance for the adopting culture. In this way I attempt to locate the meaning of yodeling by a kind of triangulation between the perspectives of musicology, semiotic and semantic analysis, and the history of ideas. My approach is thus situated within the broader tradition of American analysis of ideas founded on previous work by Arthur Lovejoy, Kenneth Pike, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Gerald Holton. My attempt to understand the yodel sign in its historical and cultural framework also derives from the approach to cultural forms taken by Roland Barthes, especially regarding connotation and secondary signification.

The musicological-analytical method employed here is likewise indebted to the topic theory of Leonard Ratner and Raymond Monelle and the semiotic analysis of popular music texts developed by Philip Tagg. Therefore, yodeling, or sometimes in more abstract senses referred to simply as the yodel, is discussed here principally in semiotic terms, that is, as sign, signifier, and signified. My approach, however, is rather different from Tagg’s. Instead of his minutely detailed analyses of the complex musical content of a single item of popular music, I follow a single sign through a variety of genres and styles over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Ultimately this work presents a history of a musical sign, paying due regard to what Pierre Bourdieu described as the cultural divide which associates each class of works with its public.¹⁶ I argue, following Bourdieu, that the yodel has become a marker delineating a deep division between social classes and taste cultures, which helps explain why certain categories of music embrace it when others reject it. I do not claim that the kinds of meaning making I discuss are the only ones of which music is capable. I don’t even claim that these are a particularly important way in the overall scheme of music’s ability to communicate. But the kinds of meaning explored here seem especially apt to yodeling, and the approach is intended to elucidate the connotations that seem to adhere to yodeling in popular music.

The English word yodel derives from the German jodeln, which means to call, to cry, and to sing. Max Peter Baumann has written that "according to Grimm and Grimm (1877), the verb jo(h)len or jola is derived from the interjection jo and may have gained the additional ‘d’ for vocal-physiological reasons."¹⁷ In other words, the modern word is an onomatopoeia deriving from the sounds used in the vocal act.

Our English word was simply borrowed from the German, albeit with a change in spelling. In fact, numerous variant spellings exist in the sheet music. Nineteenth-century English forms such as jodle and yodle are commonly encountered in the sources, but over the twentieth century the modern spelling replaced these. Nevertheless, American and British orthography differ with regard to the gerund and the present participle forms: in these American spelling maintains a single l, while British English favors doubling this consonant. Naturally, I follow American orthography here, but a variety of other forms will appear as individual items from different regions and different eras are discussed.

Yodeling in its original European manifestation is a species of work song.¹⁸ It is not the type of work song intended to keep up a steady rhythm or to urge on tired participants, for yodels are not associated with heavy work (hauling, lifting, chopping, and so forth); songs accompanying those kinds of activity typically involve a call and response, a kind of cooperative dialogue performed by a group of people on a shared task. Instead, yodeling