Yodeling
Yodeling is a form of singing which involves repeated and rapid changes of pitch between the low-pitch chest register and the high-pitch head register or falsetto. The English word yodel is derived from the German word jodeln, meaning "to utter the syllable jo". This vocal technique is used in many cultures worldwide. Recent scientific research concerning yodeling and non-Western cultures suggests that music and speech may have evolved from a common prosodic precursor.
Alpine yodeling was a longtime rural tradition in Europe, and became popular in the 1830s as entertainment in theaters and music halls. In Europe, yodeling is still a major feature of folk music from Switzerland, Austria, Southern Germany, the Eastern French regions of Alsace and Savoy and the Northern Italian region of Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol and can be heard in many contemporary folk songs, which are also featured on regular TV broadcasts.
History of Alpine yodeling
Most experts agree that yodeling was used in the Central Alps by herders calling their flocks or to communicate between Alpine villages. The multi-pitched "yelling" later became part of the region's traditional lore and musical expression. The earliest record of a yodel is in 1545, where it is described as "the call of a cowherd from Appenzell". Music historian Timothy Wise writes:From its earliest entry into European music of whatever type, the yodel tended to be associated with nature, instinct, wilderness, pre-industrial and pastoral civilization, or similar ideas. It continues to be associated with rural and folk musics or to connote those in other contexts. Because of this original folk connection, yodeling remained associated with the outdoors, with rustic rather than sophisticated personae, and with particular emotional or psychological states or semantic fields.
British stage performances by yodelers were common in the nineteenth century. Sir Walter Scott wrote in his June 4, 1830, journal entry that "Anne wants me to go hear the Tyrolese Minstrels but... I cannot but think their yodeling... is a variation upon the tones of a jackass." In Europe, yodeling is still a major feature of folk music from Switzerland, Austria, and southern Germany, and the Swiss Amish in the United States maintain the practice of yodeling to this day.
In 2025, Switzerland’s yodeling was recognized as intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO.
Yodeling around the world
Apart from the Alps, yodeling can be found in the Solomon Islands, Hawaii, Madagascar, the US, Romania, Bulgaria, and Africa.Although associated with the Swiss Alps and Austrian Tyrol, ethnomusicologists believe that the origins of yodeling can be traced back tens of thousands of years to ancient African nomadic hunter-gatherer societies.
In Scandinavian folk music, the oral-song tradition Kulning, also called huving, is a form of signal song, a shout to make themselves known over a long distance, especially used in the mountains. Usually it is linked to a transhumance tradition. The cry could be individually designed so that it was not just a cry for contact, but also a signifier used to identify the singer. The cry may have a form of text, but is just as well without words. Laling is related to yodeling in Switzerland and Austria. The overture Hjalarljod has a background in the phenomenon of yodeling. Laling is a mix of yelling and singing, and is closely related to lokk. Huving was spent in the woods and mountains to call the animals, and get in touch with other people, such as other shepherds or people on the neighboring mountain farm and to give messages over long distances.
In Persian classical music, singers frequently use tahrir, a yodeling technique that oscillates on neighbor tones. It is similar to the Swiss yodel, and is used as an ornament or trill in phrases that have long syllables, and usually falls at the end of a phrase. Tahrir is also prevalent in Azerbaijani, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Turkish, Armenian, Afghan, and Central Asian musical traditions, and to a lesser extent in Pakistani and some Indian music.
In Georgian traditional music, yodeling takes the form of krimanchuli technique, and is used as a top part in three- or four-part polyphony. Yodel-like shamanistic traditions are also seen among the Turkic Sakha people of Siberia, the Inuit of the Arctic regions of Greenland and the Saami of Scandinavia. Among the Irish and Scottish peoples hints of yodeling-like sounds are also evident. In Sakha Yakutian, yodeling plays a very important role in the way to address nature and to plead for the continuance of life.
In Central Africa, Pygmy singers use yodels within their elaborate polyphonic singing, and the Shona people of Zimbabwe sometimes yodel while playing the mbira. The Mbuti of the Congo incorporate distinctive whistles and yodels
into their songs. Living from hunting and gathering, they sing hunting and harvest songs and use yodelling to call each other. In 1952, ethnomusicologist Hugh Tracey recorded their songs and they have been released on compact discs.
In Romanian traditional folk music, yodeling takes the form of hăulit and "horea cu noduri". "Horea cu noduri" mostly used as a way of expressing sorrow. "Horea cu noduri" is a particular manner of "doina" interpretation acquired through a guttural vocal technique, the knots being strikes of the glottis through the neck muscles contractions.
Many Hawaiian songs feature falsetto. In Hawaiian-style falsettocalled ka leo kiʻekiʻethe singer, usually male, emphasizes the break between registers. Sometimes the singer exaggerates the break through repetition, as a yodel. As with other aspects of Hawaiian music, falsetto developed from a combination of sources, including pre-European Hawaiian chanting, early Christian hymn singing and the songs and yodeling of immigrant cowboys, called "paniolos" in the Hawaiian language, during the Kamehameha Reign in the 1800s when cowboys were brought from Mexico to teach Hawaiians how to care for cattle.
Yodelling arrived in America in the mid-19th century and was propagated through travelling entertainment shows.
Technique
Human voices have at least two distinct vocal registers, called the "head" and "chest" voices. Most people can sing tones within a certain range of lower pitches in their chest voice and tones within a certain range of higher pitch in their head voice. Falsetto is an "unsupported" register forcing vocal cords into a higher pitch without any head or chest voice air support. The range of overlap between registers, called the passaggio, can be challenging for untrained singers. Experienced singers can control their voices in this range, easily switching between registers. Yodeling is a version of this technique in which a singer might change register several times in only a few seconds and at a high volume. Repeated alternation between registers at a singer's passaggio pitch range produces a very distinctive sound. For example, in the famous "Yodel – Ay – EEE – Oooo", the "EEE" is sung in the head voice while all other syllables are in the chest voice.Bart Plantenga, author of Yodel-Ay-Ee-Oooo: The Secret History of Yodeling Around the World, explains the technique:
The basic yodel requires sudden alterations of vocal register from a low-pitched chest voice to high falsetto tones sung on vowel sounds: AH, OH, OO for chest notes and AY or EE for the falsetto. Consonants are used as levers to launch the dramatic leap from low to high, giving it its unique ear-penetrating and distance-spanning power.
The best places for Alpine-style yodelling are those with an echo. Ideal natural locations include not only mountain ranges but lakes, rocky gorges or shorelines, and high or open areas with one or more distant rock faces.
Yodeling in the United States
It is thought that yodeling was first introduced to the United States by German immigrants in Pennsylvania in the early 1800s. As the new settlers traveled south through the Appalachian Mountains and beyond into the Deep South they came into contact with Scots and Irish immigrants, Scandinavians, and other nationalities including African enslaved people who communicated with "field hollers", described by Frederick Law Olmsted in 1853 as a "long, loud, musical shout, rising and falling and breaking into falsetto".In 1839, the Tyrolese Minstrels toured the United States and started an American craze for Alpine music. During the 1840s, dozens of German, Swiss, and Austrian singing groups crisscrossed the country entertaining audiences with a combination of singing, yodeling, and "Alpine harmony." The popularity of the European groups led to the formation of many American family singing groups as well. The most popular was the Hutchison Family Singers who toured, singing harmony and yodeling. Minstrel shows parodied the Hutchinson's yodeling with their own, calling it "Tyrolesian business". In 1853, Christy's Minstrels burlesqued the Hutchinson Family singing 'We Come From the Hills With Tyrolean Echo'.
Other traveling American minstrels were yodeling in the United States as well. Tom Christian was the first American yodeling minstrel, appearing in 1847 in Chicago. Recordings of yodelers were made in 1892 and in 1920 the Victor recording company listed 17 yodels in their catalogue, many of them by George Watson, the most successful yodeler of the time. In 1902, Watson recorded the song "Hush-a-bye Baby," which was later recorded in 1924 by Riley Puckett as "Rock All Our Babies to Sleep," the first country yodeling record ever made. Earlier, in 1897, Watson had recorded "Sleep, Baby, Sleep" which Puckett recorded in 1927 as the second-ever country yodeling record. "Sleep, Baby, Sleep" was also the first song ever recorded by Jimmie Rodgers ; Rodgers would eventually come to be known as the father of both country music and American yodeling when he combined the yodel with southern African-American blues.
Image:Dandy Jim from Caroline.jpg|alt=Drawing of man in blackface playing the banjo with exaggerated movements and a wide-eyed expression; a smaller, similar figure is in each corner.|thumb|right|upright|Sheet music cover for "Dandy Jim from Caroline", featuring Dan Emmett and the other Virginia Minstrels, c. 1844
In the United States, traveling minstrels were yodeling in the 19th century, and, in 1920, the Victor recording company listed 17 yodels in their catalogue. In 1928, blending Alpine yodeling with African American work and blues music styles and traditional folk music, Jimmie Rodgers released his recording "Blue Yodel No. 1". Rodgers' "blue yodel", a term sometimes used to differentiate the earlier Austrian yodeling from the American form of yodeling introduced by Rodgers, created an instant national craze for yodeling in the United States; according to a black musician who lived near Rodgers in Mississippi, both black and white musicians began to copy Rodgers' style of vocal delivery.
When sound films first became available in the 1930s the industry began to turn out numerous films to meet the nation's fascination with the American cowboy. The singing cowboy was a subtype of the archetypal cowboy hero of early Western films, popularized by many of the B-movies of the 1930s and 1940s. The transformation of Rodgers' blue yodel to the cowboy yodel involved both a change in rhythm and a move away from Southern blues-type lyrics. Some yodels contained more of the Alpine type of yodel as well. Most famous of the singing cowboy film stars were Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, both accomplished yodelers. The popularity of yodeling lasted through the 1940s, but by the 1950s it became rare to hear yodeling in country and western music.
The American minstrel show consisted of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music, performed by white people in blackface or, especially after the American Civil War, black people in blackface. Minstrel shows toured the same circuits as opera companies, circuses, and European entertainers, with venues ranging from lavish opera houses to makeshift tavern stages. When the European Tyrolese Minstrels toured the United States for several years in the early 1840s and created an American craze for Alpine yodeling music, four unemployed white actors decided to stage an African-American style spoof of this group's concerts. Calling themselves Dan Emmett's Virginia Minstrels, the performance was wildly popular and most historians mark this production as the beginning of minstrelsy in the U.S. According to jazz historian Gary Giddins:
Though antebellum troupes were white, the form developed in a form of racial collaboration, illustrating the axiom that defines – and continues to define – American music as it developed over the next century and a half: African American innovations metamorphose into American popular culture when white performers learn to mimic black ones.