Quote of the Day (Roy Blount, Jr., on the Fine Art of Yodeling)

“In the abstract, yodeling may make us think of Walt Whitman’s ‘barbaric yawp,’ but a good streak of yodeling is elevated. It’s ageless, classless, beyond gender. Male yodelers come from deeper down and make a bigger jump into falsetto, but when any yodeler, young or old, commences gargling melody, he or she seems possessed, transported—not in a swoony American Idol way but as if the yodeler is channeling a bouncy, olden spirit. It’s not the yodeler doing the tonsil-juggling, it’s the yodel. An Aeolian harp being dragged by a horse—pleasingly— over washboard terrain. Steel guitar blended with locomotive chugga-chugga. Dozens of Easter eggs tumbling down a chute.” — Southern humorist and all-around man of letters Roy Blount, Jr., “Gone Off Up North: American Yawp,” Oxford American, Issue 58, Fall 2007 (Southern Music Issue Vol. IX)         

Since childhood, I had heard yodeling on TV and in movie theaters. But it is a whole different experience to hear it live, as I did 34 years ago when I first set foot in Switzerland. That night, several middle-aged men in lederhosen carried on vocally in the most carefree, merry fashion.

According to this piece by Roy Blount Jr., the Alpine version of yodeling did not derive from such close, intimate company, but rather from communicating over distances, where “your voice goes way up high….People addressing one another, or their goats or whatever, from Alp to Alp would have to shift way up high. They would have to use their clutch….And then, lacking many other forms of entertainment, they’d fool around with it some, yo-ohhh-d’ly-o’dly.”

You may have guessed, from what I’ve just written, that I’m hardly a longtime aficionado of this vocal form. But, after reading and listening (in guest appearance on NPR’s quiz show, Wait, Wait... Don’t Tell Me!) to Blount over the years, I was eager to discover what he had to say on the subject. I was not disappointed.

Few writers can match Blount for his rollicking, energetic gusto. I particularly love how he conveys the tactile experience of listening to yodeling that you get from this passage. It’s great how he juxtaposes ethereal words (“elevated,.” “falsetto,” “transported,” “swoony”) with decidedly earthier ones (“gargling,” “tonsil-joggling,” “chugga-chugga,” “tumbling”).

At the same time, he gives a concise, fun history of the great (Jimmy Rodgers, Cliff Carlisle, Ranger Doug of Riders in the Sky, Caroline Cotton, Emmett Miller) and the not-so-great (Johnny Cash and Jimmie Dale Gilmore) practitioners of yodeling.

(Yes, as you might suspect, the image accompanying this post depicts the singer Jewel, who, as Blount notes in this article, can “yodel her buns off.” When she performs “Chime Bells,” he observes, “It’s like seeing somebody who’s been drifting around on a big lilypad suddenly catch hold of a ski-rope and take off boogity-shoot over choppy water. All right! Now we’re hooking onto something!” If you don’t believe me—or Blount—then listen to her in this YouTube clip and judge for yourself.)

Quote of the Day (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., on an Age Without Heroes)

“An age without great men is one which acquiesces in the drift of history. Such acquiescence is easy and seductive; the great appeal of fatalism, indeed, is as a refuge from the terror of responsibility. Where a belief in great men insistently reminds us that individuals can make a difference, fatalism reassures us that they can’t. It thereby blesses our weakness and extenuates our failure.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (1917-2007), “The Decline of Heroes,” The Saturday Evening Post, Nov. 1, 1958

When I came across this essay in a nearly 50-year-old high school textbook, I couldn’t help but ponder how it applied to the current situation. While mourning the absence of figures like the Allied leaders in WWII, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. simply couldn’t conceive of a day when a statue of one of those titans, Winston Churchill, would be vandalized in England—nor that a wave of such icon-smashing would occur across the Atlantic, in the United States.

Yet that was hardly the least of the ironies in this piece:

*In decrying the lack of “great men” at the time he was writing (toward the end of the Eisenhower administration), Schlesinger may well have been thinking literally of a single sex—none of the major figures he cited were female.

*Schlesinger did not foresee that, only two years after writing this article, he would support a Presidential candidate whose tragically shortened “thousand days” in the Oval Office would make him the dominant personality of the Sixties: John F. Kennedy.

*While noting that “historical fatalism” and a collectivist, homogeneous society had undermined the yearning for heroes, Schlesinger did not anticipate two forces that would diminish that instinct even more rapidly today: historical revisionism and multiculturalism. The civil-rights movement, still in an early stage, had only just begun to move historians towards reinterpreting the Civil War and Reconstruction as well as the individuals who dominated those eras. It would take another three decades before Schlesinger—a former national chair of the liberal political organization Americans for Democratic Action—would come to regard multiculturalism’s impact on the teaching of history with mounting misgivings in The Disuniting of America  (1991).

In one instance, Schlesinger, having come of age during the rise of fascism abroad, sensed the danger of a dominant figure in the White House, one who knew how to exploit the resentments of the common man:

“To say that there is a case for heroes is not to say that there is a case for hero worship. The surrender of decision, the unquestioning submission to leadership, the prostration of the average man before the Great Man — these are the diseases of heroism, and they are fatal to human dignity.”

Quote of the Day (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., on Freedom and Struggle)

“Freedom is inseparable from struggle; it is a process, not a conclusion.”— Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (1917-2007), The Politics of Hope (1963)