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Yodel-Ay-Ee-Oooo: The Secret History of Yodeling around the World had been out not even a day when a woman acquaintance approached me on a train platform overlooking the Hudson River. She’d heard me on NPR discussing the book and asked: “Did you include Olivio Santoro?” No. “Oh, you should’ve . . .” And despite the UTNE Reader declaring Yodel-Ay-Ee-Oooo “one of the most complete studies of any subject ever” I knew my completism had not been completed and every subsequent day brought me a new yodeler, shoving me toward yet another reason to write Yodel in Hi-Fi. Several weeks after Yodel-Ay-Ee-Oooo’s publication, I received a cassette and letter from Alabama’s Felts Twins, Gertrude and Gesna. The cassette was homemade; the cover was a photo, cut to the size of the cassette box, of them pickin’ ’n’ yodelin’ in their living room. The accompanying letter gives some context: We have been singing and yodeling ever since we were about six years old. Our daddy, Gordon Felts, loved Jimmy Rodgers yodeling and singing. Daddy taught us to yodel when we were very young. There were ten of us children at home, but as soon as daddy got up a little money he bought us a guitar. We have always loved to sing and yodel old country songs. We still love to get together at our old home with our family and friends, picking and grinning as often as we can. . . . We have never tried to get out into the world and sing professionally. We both have families to raise. But in the last few years Gesna wrote some songs and we decided to put them on a tape along with our yodeling songs that we have sung over the years. We are sending you one of our tapes. We hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed making it.1 xiii Preface Drive-by Yodel The ear hears only what the soul is ready to accept . . . —a slight alteration of a Henri Bergson quote Yodeling will be the next great craze in Western Democratic Countries . . . with its appeal to ancestral forces within all of us, it will dominate the world’s cultural institutions by the year . —Trout Pomeroy, Days Gone Bill The Felts Twins Rereading this five years later, while listening to their high lonesome yodels on “Shawnee Moon,” I began to realize the importance of this second book. Mea culpa : Fanatical traditionalist-preservationists endanger the very traditions they wish to preserve, choking them off as a sad photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, each copy further degenerating the in-flux original. The folkish, negotiated song sung at picnics becomes a lyric sheet handed out to students to sing during patriotic holidays. This dynamic also applies to yodeling. The more it seems traditionalists are warning of yodeling’s demise the more I need to insist it’s not true. Yes, I share some fatal flaws with those preservationists of confabulated traditions. Sometimes I want to preserve yodeling’s vitality by mummifying, quantifying , and documenting it, but I am—hopefully—also capable of hearing vital yodeling almost everywhere. Its ubiquity is proof of its value and ironic key to its invisibility. Mea culpa : While writing Yodel-Ay-Ee-Oooo, I sometimes trusted seemingly legitimate Internet sources. The Internet has since evolved so that I can now actually listen to almost everything I write about. One of the pitfalls of the Internet is that—back then—I plainly assumed too much and ended up, for instance, writing that Alice Babs had died. She had not! I almost dedicated the book to “the late” Kenny Roberts because several sites had informed me that he too had died. Luckily, a friend’s eagle eye caught this blunder just before publication and I could dedicate Yodel-Ay-Ee-Oooo to a very much alive and still yodeling Kenny Roberts. I learned my lesson on that one. xiv PREFACE: DRIVEBY YODEL Pseudo-Cowboy Yodeler Who Sold Dog Food Olivio Santoro (–?), the guitar-playing “Boy Yodeler,” hosted his own syndicated Mutual radio show in the late s, the Hertz Pet Food Half Hour, a variety show that featured Santoro’s yodeling and other acts, like singing canaries, between pet food commercials. He later switched from Mutual to NBC, where his show was the eighth most popular American radio program. In , Santoro published How to Yodel: The Only Book Ever Published on the Strange Art of...

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