Tootle of a Devilish Song

ROMAN MARS: This is 99% Invisible, I’m Roman Mars. 

It’s a sweltering June morning in Basel, Switzerland. Trams roll through the streets. Some people get their first coffee while others cool off in the Rhine. 

GABE BULLARD: I’m coming up here to the Münsterplatz. This is the big cathedral in the square… 

ROMAN MARS: That’s reporter and Basel resident Gabe Bullard. 

GABE BULLARD: There’s a group here of people in their traditional outfits, the dark pants, white shirts, suspenders with edelweiss… 

ROMAN MARS: But this isn’t everyday Basel. Gabe is attending a celebration of Swiss folk music that happens every three years, called Jodlerfest. 

GABE BULLARD: Jodlerfest is what I imagine people outside of Switzerland think the country is like every day. It’s like a snow globe idea of Switzerland. People are in their long sleeved traditional clothes, sitting at long wooden tables, eating meals that are mostly melted cheese, even though we’re in a record heatwave. A couple times, I passed by one of those wood cutouts where you put your face through to take a photo. These are of a man and woman in traditional Swiss clothes out in the mountains. And everywhere I go, from every direction, I can hear yodeling. 

[YODELING] 

ROMAN MARS: Some people here have been yodeling all their lives, like Anita Villiger from central Switzerland. 

ANITA VILLIGER: I’m a mountain girl. I have seven sisters and brothers. And then we take yodeling and music for a hobby and family. 

ROMAN MARS: Others are here to just bask in the sounds, like Franziska Morgen and Gabriela Santamaria. 

GABRIELA SANTAMARIA: I’ve always found it very attractive–very beautiful–all that has to do with folklore. In any culture, folklore is like the best thing ever. 

GABE BULLARD: Franziska and Gabriela live in the area, and I met them as they were walking between food stalls set up to look like mountain chalets. They had just come from a yodeling class, their first time trying it. 

[FRANZISKA AND GABRIELA YODEL]

GABE BULLARD: That was wonderful! Thank you so much…

ROMAN MARS: Jodlerfest is, at its core, a celebration of an old and beloved folk tradition. Some of the melodies drifting out from the street corners and buildings are the same ones you could hear in a small mountain town hundreds of years ago. 

GABE BULLARD: But beyond Jodlerfest and the streets of Basel, yodeling has had a much bigger and much more international arc because, in the early 19th century, yodeling broke containment. This very Swiss tradition escaped the Alps, traveled across the Atlantic, and helped define a quintessentially American style of music. 

[WALMART KID YODELING]

GABE BULLARD: Most of us know what a yodel sounds like but maybe not how it’s made. That unmistakable sound of the yodel is the result of a physiological flip that happens inside the singer’s body. 

NADJA RASS: The yodel is a singing technique where we use the different registers. So, for example, the head voice… [SINGS IN HEAD VOICE] Or the chest voice… [SINGS IN CHEST VOICE] And very typical for yodeling is to switch between those two… [YODELS]

GABE BULLARD: Nadja Rass is one of the leading voices, metaphorically and literally, of Swiss yodeling today. 

ROMAN MARS: The register switch is something that happens naturally, even accidentally, like if your voice cracks while you’re shouting. And people around the world have been making music with this vocal quirk for centuries. 

GABE BULLARD: In Iran, it’s called Tahrir singing, in Georgia, krimanchuli. Within the Alps, different countries and even different valleys have their own unique versions of this singing. There’s a classic Swiss yodel, which is markedly different than, say, an Austrian yodel. 

ROMAN MARS: Despite what we know about its regional variations, the origins of the alpine yodel are shrouded in mountain mist. 

YANNICK WEY: History is just a loose end. It’s in the dark. We cannot say it goes back to this and that century because we don’t have written documents about it. We don’t have artifacts, like with musical instruments. 

ROMAN MARS: This is Yannick Wey, a musicologist who has studied alpine music. He also plays the alphorn, you know, the horns that the guys play in the Ricola commercials. Yannick says that some of the earliest yodelers were probably cattle herders in the Alps. And one of the early possible references to yodeling is a document from around the year 400 that describes some alpine singing as, quote, “ululate carmine diaboli,” which an Austrian folklorist in the 20th century translated as “toodle of a devilish song.”

GABE BULLARD: More reliable documentation picks up around the 16th century, when travelers through the Alps described a type of music unique to the region. In French, it would come to be known as “ranz de vache,” and in German, “Kuhreihen.”

YANNICK WEY: In English it’s usually translated as “cattle call,” and this is sort of a name for a bunch of different music, some of it yodeled, some of it sung maybe without yodeling, and some of it played on the alpine horn or on different instruments. 

GABE BULLARD: The reason cattle herders were devilishly tootling up in the mountains is debated. Musicologists think yodeling could have been a way for those herders to communicate across long distances. 

YANNICK WEY: So, on the Alps, it was very scarcely populated territory. If you were working on the mountains, herding animals, it was maybe a very lonely thing to do. And you needed something to communicate over distances, both to communicate to other people that you are fine–that you’re in good health–and so on, and also to call cows and other animals. 

GABE BULLARD: Another theory is that yodeling was part of religious ceremonies. 

YANNICK WEY: For ritual purposes, for sort of… We could today say magic. 

GABE BULLARD: And there’s also the fact that it’s just fun to yodel. Imagine you’re out miles from your home with only the company of your herd. You can shout into the mountain air and your echo answers back. 

ROMAN MARS: For centuries, these yodels bounced around the Alps, entertaining lonely herders, maybe being sung in mountain taverns or around a family dinner table. But in the 1700s, a shift came that would help launch the yodel from a pastoral pastime into a global sensation. 

GABE BULLARD: What that change looked like was a surge of interest from people who weren’t herding cows. 

ROMAN MARS: In the 18th and 19th centuries, European travelers were embarking on grand tours of the continent. Europe’s young elite would drink wine, study art, and generally acquire a sense of worldliness to flaunt back home–basically, a Regency-era gap year. 

GABE BULLARD: Popular destinations included Rome, Paris, and the snowy expanse of the Swiss Alps. 

ROMAN MARS: And with wealthy foreigners arriving to take in the sights and sounds of Switzerland, yodelers couldn’t help but notice. 

YANNICK WEY: It was also then an opportunity for people to make some money by performing in touristic locations on the countryside and also on mountains.

GABE BULLARD: With tourism, yodeling transformed from a cattle call into a performance. Singers worked the yodel into songs, singing a verse and then yodeling a chorus, what’s called the “jodellied,” compared to a “naturjodel” done without lyrics. 

ROMAN MARS: Performers also took some festive liberties. No true cattle herder would wear something special to sing to their cows. But these performance yodelers wanted to lay it on thick for the tourists. They put on their tracht, the traditional folksy outfits, to play up the exoticism of their homeland. 

GABE BULLARD: Pretty soon, there were suspended yodelers at every turn. 

YANNICK WEY: That also led to a backlash by the authorities, where there were too many of these beggars going around with a horn or just singing. Well, it became a bit annoying to the tourists. 

GABE BULLARD: In his book, A Tramp Abroad, Mark Twain writes about a hike in Switzerland where he heard a shepherd yodeling. He gives the shepherd some money to keep singing. He does the same with another shepherd later on, and another, then another. Eventually, Twain pays the locals to stop singing. He writes, “There is somewhat too much of the yodeling in the Alps.”

ROMAN MARS: Luckily, not everyone agreed with Mark Twain. Tourists to the Alps heard yodeling and were captivated. It was this otherworldly echoing sound unlike anything they’d ever heard. Some people were so taken that they wanted to find a way to write down the yodel and bring it back with them. 

GABE BULLARD: Unfortunately for them, yodeling was an oral tradition without any sheet music. 

YANNICK WEY: You have a really funny exchange of letters, you know, where somebody from the city in Zurich was asking his friend to deliver a notation of one of these cattle calls and said, “You know, I’ve been trying so hard to get one. But if I ask the people here in the village for it, they just laugh at me. They just make fun of me. When they’re singing, it goes on for an hour. And how am I supposed to write that down?”

GABE BULLARD: People did eventually figure out how to write down a yodel. And pretty soon the sounds of the Alps drifted out into the wider world. 

ROMAN MARS: Yodeling reached Switzerland’s close neighbors in continental Europe and then further into the British Isles. But nowhere did it take hold more forcefully than across the ocean in the United States, where it was about to create a new, very American genre of music. 

GABE BULLARD: Yodeling first reached the United States in the early 1800s, when troops of European singers traveled across the Atlantic to perform for American audiences. They came with their special outfits and traditional songs, ready to delight the crowds with the exotic sounds of the Alps. 

ROMAN MARS: It’s worth noting this probably wouldn’t have been the first time Americans were hearing a vocal flip in music. Many people were already familiar with the field holler, a way of singing practiced by enslaved people working on farms and plantations in the south. Here is an example recorded in 1939, performed by Thomas J. Marshall. 

[WHOLE COUNTRY]

GABE BULLARD: But this distinct alpine style of yodeling took off in part because European yodlers were offering a performance, a costumed spectacle. And before long Swiss, German, and Austrian yodelers became a fixture of the American entertainment landscape. 

ROMAN MARS: American imitators also jumped on the bandwagon, and over the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries, yodeling became fully incorporated into the racial melting pot of American entertainment. 

GABE BULLARD: Yodeling was everywhere. It became a staple of blackface minstrel shows. At the same time, white performers also imitated the field holler. And Black musicians yodeled on the vaudeville stage. 

ROMAN MARS: The yodel was one influence of many being mixed and matched by American entertainers. Then a singing railroad brakeman from Mississippi came along and took the yodel to new heights. 

[THE SOLDIER’S SWEETHEART]

ROMAN MARS: Those are the dulcet tones of a man named Jimmie Rodgers. 

GABE BULLARD: Rodgers grew up across the southern United States, working on the railroad and playing music whenever he could. 

JOCELYN NEAL: At the time, Rodgers perceived of himself just as a popular entertainer. He listened to everything he could get his hands on. He toured with different groups. He was always willing to perform if someone was willing to pay him. 

GABE BULLARD: Jocelyn Neal is a professor and historian who focuses on American popular music. She says he was a savvy entertainer with an ear for whatever might get an audience. He played what was called at the time “hillbilly music,” a catch-all term for music from the white, working class South. But he also heard folk and blues music while traveling around. He picked up work songs from Black colleagues on the railroad. He played medicine shows and minstrel shows. He had a stint with a jazz band and later a string band. 

ROMAN MARS: Jimmie was jack-of-all-trades. And in 1927, he went into a recording studio and laid down something unexpected, an original song he’d been working on called T for Texas. 

[T FOR TEXAS]

GABE BULLARD: You could really hear the blues influence. This is the style of music Rodgers would have heard played mostly by Black musicians all through the South. 

JOCELYN NEAL: The songs themselves that Jimmie Rodgers is recording are very much in what we would call a blues form. They use the rhymed couplets. They use the use of a refrain. They come with the same chord progressions. Now, he modified them here and there, but again, a regular listener on the street could listen to this and say, “Oh yeah, I hear the blues form in there. I hear a 12-bar blues chord progression.” So that blues song form was present, and the yodel was added into it. 

GABE BULLARD: Rodgers never explained where he got his yodeling. He surely heard all types of head-chest register flips, including from Black yodelers on vaudeville stages. But his style traces back to alpine singers. 

JOCELYN NEAL: I’m pretty sure from having listened to a bunch of the source material that Jimmie Rodgers was borrowing a vaudeville, stylized performance technique that is absolutely linked to Tyrolean yodeling and is a European import. 

ROMAN MARS: When Jimmie Rodgers recorded an alpine yodel over a 12-bar blues progression, he set off a chemical reaction in the music industry. His sound wasn’t quite the blues or the standard hillbilly music of the time or anything else. It was what we would now call country. 

GABE BULLARD: And people loved it. 

JOCELYN NEAL: It absolutely was astonishing how popular this music was. He caught the attention of a broad population of people who were really connected to his music in a way that I think it’s very hard for a regular listener today to think. We’d have to think about a superstar today at the level of global attention to match what Jimmie Rodgers was able to do with the American population as a vernacular performer in the late 1920s. The stories that we hear are that people would literally go down to their local general store to get their daily supplies and a Jimmie Rodgers record–whatever had come out. 

GABE BULLARD: Rodgers wasn’t the very first to combine blues and yodeling. The idea had already been percolating for a while. And a black composer named Clarence Williams had written a song called Yodeling Blues earlier in the ’20s. But Jimmie Rodgers was the first one to turn that combination into a commercial hit. 

ROMAN MARS: Today, Jimmie Rodgers is known as the father of country music. Rodgers sits alongside a very few number of artists, like the Carter family, who pioneered the genre by blending all sorts of American influences: blues, field hollering, old British and Irish folk songs… And Rodger’s thing was his yodel. 

GABE BULLARD: Rodgers’ producer called his first big hit, T for Texas, a Blue Yodel. And that was just Blue Yodel Number One. Rodgers would record a dozen more, including one with Louis Armstrong on trumpet. 

[BLUE YODEL NO. 9]

ROMAN MARS: Other performers wanted to do what was popular, and Jimmie Rodgers was popular. So before long, Yodeling was all over the proto-country scene. 

GABE BULLARD: Lots of hillbilly artists used the yodel, finding all sorts of ways to catch people’s attention, like Mary Jane and Carolyn DeZurik, sisters from Minnesota who became popular on the radio in the 1930s. 

[I LEFT HER STANDING THERE]

GABE BULLARD: While the DeZurik Sisters were doing that, Gene Autry was yodeling his way into Hollywood. 

ROMAN MARS: Autry became known as the Singing Cowboy and the films he was in shaped the iconography of the West with his big hat, his broken heart, and his rhinestone suit. 

GABE BULLARD: Get this, rhinestones have an alpine origin too. The name refers to clear stones that were found in the Rhine River, which originates in Switzerland. The word was applied to glass and plastic beads later on. 

ROMAN MARS: There’s not as much alpine-style yodeling in modern country music compared to the music made in the ’20s and ’30s. 

GABE BULLARD: But what has carried over is the head-chest-register flip. That little flip, heard in the yodel and the field holler, remains an essential part of a country musician’s repertoire. It conveys the emotion of a lonesome cowboy, borrowing some of that heartbreaking pastoral quality of the mountains. For example, with Hank Williams’ version of the song Lovesick Blues. 

[LOVESICK BLUES]

JOCELYN NEAL: In that song, he uses a vocal break where he sings a word, and then he splits his voice across his vocal break up to a high register, comes back down, and repeats that process in the middle of a word. So it’s a little bit of a different technique than what Jimmie Rodgers was doing. But again, if we’re taking that broader categorization of yodels as singing with multiple vocal registers, then Hank Williams is absolutely doing it. 

GABE BULLARD: Today, the influence of yodeling has become so woven into the fabric of country music that most of us wouldn’t even identify it as yodeling anymore. The vocal flip, the crying steel guitar, it just sounds like country. 

When you look at the dramatic evolution of yodeling in America, how it jumped from vaudeville performances to cowboy films and the world’s biggest country stages, it seems a little odd that yodeling back in Switzerland often looks and sounds like it did in the 1800s, people in traditional outfits singing traditional songs, evoking a pastoral Swiss yesteryear. 

ROMAN MARS: There’s a reason today’s Swiss yodeling still feels so traditional and nostalgic. In the 1940s, while Jean Autry was yodeling in his rhinestones, Switzerland was having a very different experience. Europe was embroiled in the Second World War, and Switzerland wanted to avoid any association with Germany. 

GABE BULLARD: One way to do this was to distinguish themselves as much as possible as different and separate from their Nazi neighbors. Here’s Yannick Wey again. 

YANNICK WEY: Switzerland had this so-called Geistige Landesvertageung, this somewhat spiritual defense of the nation, where yodeling became important as something that distinguished Switzerland from its German-speaking neighbors, even though maybe, from the musical tradition, we’re much closer than we think. 

GABE BULLARD: The message was very much that “we may speak German, but we are not Germans. Our yodel sounds nothing like their yodel. So please, for the love of God, leave us out of this.”

ROMAN MARS: One weapon in this cultural defense was a yodeling textbook published in 1943. That book is called… Oh, Christ. Okay, uh… Eidgenössischer Jodlerverband Schulungsgrundlage für Jodlerinnen und Jodler.

GABE BULLARD: Also known as the Swiss Yodeling Association Training Fundamentals for Yodeling Women and Yodeling Men. 

ROMAN MARS: The book–whose name I said before perfectly–laid out some standards for Swiss yodeling, not Bavarian yodeling, not Austrian, just pure Swiss yodeling. It said which melodies to sing and which techniques to use. 

YANNICK WEY: There’s even a, like… On one of the first pages it says, “Everything un-Swiss in yodeling has to be eradicated.”

GABE BULLARD: In addition to the book, the Yodeling Association put on contests where judges would favor certain types of yodels over others. And for many years, singers tended to stick to a textbook, jury-approved set of melodies, sounds, and flourishes. 

ROMAN MARS: The Yodeling Association did keep people yodeling, but this focus on a regulation Swiss style narrowed what had been a pretty diverse tradition. And the influence of these regulations and norms lasted long after the war was over. Still, you can’t keep a good yodel down. And today Switzerland is enjoying a surge of interest in yodeling, especially with younger generations who want to play with vocal technique that is–let’s face it–very fun. 

GABE BULLARD: I talked to Nadja Rass about this at Jodlerfest. 

GABE BULLARD: And one thing that has surprised me, so far walking around, is how many young people there are yodeling. Is that a change you’ve seen recently? 

NADJA RASS: I think it’s a change which developed since three, four, five years, so I think the yodel community is much younger than five years before. 

GABE BULLARD: What do you think that means for the future of yodeling? 

NADJA RASS: This is a very good sign, of course, so I think it means that yodel will stay alive. 

GABE BULLARD: Nadja has been part of this preservation. In 2018, students at the Hochschule Luzern specifically requested a college-level yodeling program. And she was selected to run it. 

ROMAN MARS: The program isn’t alpine cosplay. It honors the tradition of yodeling while pushing it forward. Students study the history of yodeling and what it sounded like before the rules and competitions and clubs. They listen to archival recordings, to American country songs, and they write and perform new yodels. 

GABE BULLARD: On the day I visited, students put on a concert that included a song written by Nadja. One alum of the program is Andrea Kuttel, who’s now yodeling with her band, Quartz. And she also blends yodeling with jazz, classical music, and other genres. 

ANDREA KUTTEL: I had the opportunity to yodel with a percussionist from Cuba, so it fits with other types of music as well. So it’s really cool to interact with different types of music. 

ROMAN MARS: The reinvention of yodeling doesn’t stop with Nadja and her students. For every traditional melody being honored and preserved in a Swiss yodeling club, there’s another young artist taking the yodel and doing something entirely different, like the Swiss-Spanish artist called Vagamundos, who samples yodels in reggaeton tracks. 

[DEMBOW SUIZO FT. HÉLOHEÏDI]

GABE BULLARD: When I listen to Vagamundos or Andrea’s band, Quartz, or any of these other new artists, I can’t help but feel a sense of déjà vu, like what happened to yodeling in America might be happening now in Switzerland. Like Jimmie Rodgers before them, Switzerland’s new generation of yodelers is taking the yodel, flipping it on its head, and possibly changing music forever. 

ROMAN MARS: After the break, some of our favorite yodeling deep cuts. 

[AD BREAK]

ROMAN MARS: So, Gabe, this story had some really amazing archival recordings. But there are also a lot of yodels that got left on the cutting room floor, and we wanted to play a few of them. 

GABE BULLARD: Yes. As I was reporting this story, I got so fascinated by this era between when yodeling first came to the U.S. and when it ended up in country music. And so these European yodelers–they came over, like, in the early 1800s. The Blue Yodel from Jimmie Rodgers, that’s 1927. So there’s, like, a century of yodeling just kind of bouncing around America at the time. 

ROMAN MARS: Totally. Totally. Okay. Let’s learn more. 

GABE BULLARD: Yeah, so this really blew my mind that the first known recordings of yodeling were made in the United States. This is something that Yannick, who we heard from in the story, was telling me. And he sent me this. George P. Watson is the performer, and this is from the late 1890s. 

[ALPINE SPECIALTY]

ROMAN MARS: Wow, so that was not recorded in Switzerland, but recorded in America. That is so amazing to me. 

GABE BULLARD: Yeah. The very first recording of a yodel was from 1892, I believe, also made in the United States. But this one was definitely one of the earliest. It makes sense on the one hand because the technology was in the U.S., there were all these people yodeling, and everything. But then also the Swiss experts I talked to were intrigued by this because we don’t have an equivalent from the Alps at the time. Like, there’s sheet music maybe, but it’s an oral tradition, it’s evolving over time, and it’s not captured at any kind of snapshot like that until we have an ability to record it. So we don’t really know what yodeling was sounding like anywhere else in the world at this time. 

ROMAN MARS: That’s amazing. So what other yodels do you have for me? 

GABE BULLARD: So this next one comes from the 20th century when a lot of popular performers are sort of using the yodel as part of their toolkit. And this is from 1924. It’s fascinating. It’s a group called the Seven Musical Magpies, and it’s called the Calliope Song because they’re not just yodeling but they are imitating the calliope, that big, steam-powered, circus pipe organ. 

[CALLIOPE SONG]

GABE BULLARD: I really enjoy that one. I love that one of the big influences here is technology. Like, the Calliope was the sensation and– 

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, yeah, yeah. They’re, like, beatboxing–imitating the sound of an instrument. 

GABE BULLARD: Yeah, these singers think, “You know what sounds like a calliope? Yodeling.” And that’s some amazing vocal technique, which is also something that a lot of the Swiss yodelers I talked to were really impressed by. You know, we heard the DeZurik Sisters, too, in the story. They’ve heard some of these yodels and are impressed at the technique and everything, especially given these aren’t people learning it from their families out in the Alps, passing it down from generation to generation. These are entertainers sort of doing what’s popular, picking up the trade from others. 

ROMAN MARS: And what about the other yodeling blues singers? Like, you mentioned in the story that Jimmie Rodgers was the first person to kind of hit it big combining blues and yodeling. But he wasn’t the first to do it, right? 

GABE BULLARD: Right, so Jimmie Rodgers has that sort of alpine-derived yodel, sung over blues chords. But that basic mix of blues and yodeling had been tested and recorded. There’s the song I mentioned, the Yodeling Blues. It’s written by Clarence Williams, and it’s sung by Sara Martin and Eva Taylor. And it was recorded in the ’20s. 

[YODELING BLUES]

ROMAN MARS: That’s really nice. It’s not quite as yodel-y as some of the others, but I enjoy the tone of it. 

GABE BULLARD: Yeah, it’s not the full on little old lady who styled what Jimmie Rodgers was doing, but it does have that melody of the yodel. And lyrically the song is wistful and romantic, like a lot of these yodeling songs, and that’s something the yodel certainly evokes. The other thing that this song speaks to is an undercurrent throughout the history of country music, which is the erasure of the way Black artists contributed to the origins of the genre. The Seven Musical Magpies, Clarence Williams, Sara Martin, Eva Taylor–these were all Black artists. And they’re playing with the same influences as Jimmie Rodgers. They’re doing it earlier than him. But as the record industry built up, they were not the ones ultimately to profit from it. 

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, it’s another story that we hear over and over again across all of recorded music. Well, this was so fascinating, Gabe. I love this tour through the yodel and these leftover yodels on the cutting room floor. Such a fun story. Thank you for bringing it to us. 

GABE BULLARD: Thanks a lot, Roman! 

ROMAN MARS: 99% Invisible was reported this week by Gabe Bullard and edited by Kelly Prime. Mix by Martín Gonzalez. Music by Swan Real, with help from Mya Byrne and APM. Fact-checking by Graham Hacia. 

Special thanks this week to Linda Golden for interpretation help. Gabe actually has a new book called Against Convenience, which is out now. It’s an exploration of modern “convenience culture,” and I can’t wait to read it! It is right up my alley and probably yours too! 

Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is our digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jayson De Leon, Emmett FitzGerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Lasha Madan, Joe Rosenberg, Jeyca Medina-Gleason, Talon and Rain Stradley, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. 

We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast Family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building… in beautiful… uptown… Oakland, California. You can find us on all the usual social media sites, as well as our Discord server. There’s a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI, at 99pi.org.