Take yourself out on the range and yodel along with one of the best in the West.
Duration: 4:20
I just can’t stop watching and listening to a good yodeler any more than I can take my eyes off a crackling fireplace. Throw another log on the yodeler. For a long time it’s been a burning desire of mine to yodel. I try at the end of “Night Rider’s Lament” - and fail. As Bob Loper told me: “Anyone can learn to yodel but maybe some of us shouldn’t.”
It takes a lot of practice. As a teenager Bob learned by climbing an old jack fence to sit on the highest pole so he could see for miles up and down a dirt road. “A car would come down that road maybe once every two weeks but I wanted to make dang sure nobody was around when I started honkin’ something out,” Loper recalls. The practice sessions paid off. Bob grew to make a pretty good living yodeling up a storm across fifteen western states. He spent much of that time in the Jackson Hole area and now resides in Cody enjoying retirement by whipping out his guitar and yodeling away the day.
We got together a while back in the Buffalo Bill Historical Center – set up in the Buffalo Bill Cody wing in front of a homey old western living room exhibit complete with Victorian furniture and ornate doilies. You know I don’t think I’ve ever written that word before and I’ve written many miles of strung-together letters. Doilies. Kind of a musical sound. Good yodeling partners those doilies. Now I can’t stop writing it. Somebody throw a log and shut me up, now.
Yodels came to the U.S. by way of immigrants from Switzerland, Bavaria, Austria and northern Italy. Loper told me Swiss folks could communicate across wide canyons by standing on opposite ridges and transforming their voices from regular speaking levels to a falsetto. “There’s more clarity with falsetto. They could hear that better than plain hollering,” Bob asserts. So I guess those television commercials for throat lozenges had some basis in reality.
Early-day cattlemen around the West used a yodel of sorts to settle the herd. “If you can envision a herd of cattle that’s about half wild – out on the range and not handled a lot – it’s a little ticklish to get them into a railroad corral or any kind of containment so they could be loaded and transported,” says Loper. He recalls watching old timers move cattle along quietly by singing a soft: wooWHOO cattle…wooWHOO cattle. “You could see the cattle settle down. Pretty soon one of the animals would dart into the corral. You’d put a little pressure on the rest of the herd and they’d go on in,” Loper reminisces fondly.
Our Cody conversation led to Loper’s description of how yodels entered the saddlebag of a singing cowboy. “He got a hold of that unique type of sound and started to incorporate it into the music. Yodeling was used as a way to emphasize different songs or parts of songs. You can yodel into a kind of lonesome wailing to emphasize a love song. You can also use it to emphasize gaiety and spontaneous reactions to crowds and dancing. And then you have introductory measures to a song and some times at the end of a song to help extend the message smoothly.”
Smooth. That’s what the good yodelers do. Make the bumps go better in the day and through the night. For a lifetime.
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