American Yodeling 1911-1946 - 26 wonderful examples of "inarticulated singing from the throat" and low-down, high-up vocal trickery by some of the best. Some classics like Emmett Miller's divine "Lovesick Blues", Bill Monroes's "Mule Skinner" alongside some absolute killer unknowns (to me) like the DeZurik Sister's boggling performance of "Arizona Yodeler" which is wearing my repeat button out! And then, there's Cliff Carlisle's "Nasty Swing" an object lesson in restraint and power that is a perfect showcase for his fine yodeling style. Some folks might feel that a full album of yodelling pre-war old-timey songsters and bluesmen might get a bit tiring but they's be wrong! This is a terrific set of exciting performances, perfectly sequenced by Christoph Wagner, the perfectionist who gave us Trikont's other classic album "Black & White Hillbilly Music", I think this will do just as well as that gem!

Hearing New Yorker Dawn McCarthy perform in London last year, it was a shock when she inserted full-blooded yodelling into her very modern songs about cruelty and confusion. McCarthy is reaching back to a vocal tradition that forms part of the story of the Germans and Swiss in America. Empolyed by many black singers in the 19th century, yodelling became a national craze of epicemic proportions in the 1920s, largely due to the success of Jimmie Rodgers and his "Blue Yodels". The Blue Yodel included in this golden age compilation is "No 9" - "Standing On The Corner". Rodgers is accompanied by Louis Armstrong on cornet and Lil Armstrong on piano. Other vocal acrobatic delights include the Cajun Guidry Brothers. Bob Wills And His Texas Playboys, and the weird close harmonies of The DeZurik Sisters, who were among the few to break the taboo-de lay-hoo against women in early Country music. THE WIRE

"You are probably wondering how you lived so long without that one."
(Fiona Talkington on "American Yodeling", BBC Radio 3, Late Junction, 4-7-02)

'Late Junction" (weekdays from 22 - 24 pm) is the new, very successful mix-music-programme on BBC / Radio 3 (originally the classical music channel) playing everything from classical music, early music, jazz, world music and folk.

  A component of American minstrel shows from the mid- 1800-s onward, yodelling is intrinsic to singing in Madagascar and Eastern Europe as well as its traditional association with Alpine song. In America, though, the technique was clearly imported and, characteristically, was first integrated into indigenous music by black entertainers. Yodelling records caught on in the first two decades of the 20th century. Several of these (properly cylinders rather than records, as cut for the Edison company) referenced Swiss and German themes and were sung by an early white yodeller, George P Watson, who would later record for Columbia and Victor. His lullaby "Sleep, Baby, Sleep" is the final track (and the earliest recording, from 1911) on a wide-ranging collection surveying the 'yodelling fever' which gripped American record buyers in the years prior to the Second World War. Issued by the German Trikont label, American Yodeling 1911- 1946 blends successful cormmercial releases with those cut by artists whose yodels were heard by a relative few. The style was associated with Country records, specifically those sung by cowboy characters like Roy Rogers ("Cowboy Herd Night Song") and Sons Of The Pioneers ("The Devil's Great Grandson"), irrespective of the yodelling cowboy actually being "one of the mightiest pop hallucinations of all time" according to Nick Tosches, in his illuminating history, Country. The Singing Brakeman, Jimmie Rodgers, was famed above all Country blue yodellers, imitated by black and white musicians alike; his "Standin' On The Corner (Blue Yodel No 9)" is here, as is the work of a Rodgers clone, Cliff Carlisle ("The Yodeling Hobo"), who extolled his own unsavoury mien with "The Nasty Swing". There may have been something to his declaration, as Carlisle was later covered by Elvis Presley. The "soft, precise" harmonies of The Delmore Brothers were inspired also by Jimmie rodgers. A quarter century later, the everly brothers would run to the bank with their sound.
the wire, may 2002