Witch doctor

So what about songs that learned more into traditional supernatural themes?

Witchdoctor by David Saville in 1957 is crucial here.

Saville, who would later create the Chipmunks, pioneered this high-pitched, speed-up vocal style that became hugely influential.

The song tells the story of a guy seeking advice from a witchdoctor to win over his crush, and it's got this incredibly catchy, repetitive chorus that just burrows into your brain.

Right.

We got to start with the witch doctors.

Yeah, there's the witch doctor and then there are the Buddhist monks who are

different.

I was like, I feel like I've heard this somewhere before.

Yeah.

No, but I guess, I guess a big part of Philip Montova's thing is like towns will have witch doctors.

Sure.

Peggy Cochran is on the air with us.

She has written The Witch Doctor's Manual.

And I guess there are many different remedies that some actually work, so you say, in the book, right?

Oh, yes, lots of them do.

Some of our listeners are going along with the...

Hopefully it won't be rough out there in the Pacific on the way to Mexico, but is there anything for seasickness?

Well, the kahunas, who are the witch doctors in Hawaii, they recommend eating soda crackers and then taking a copper penny and taping it on the navel.

And I've heard that it

Get yourself ready.

We're going to the witch doctor.

[tense music]

Baba, do you have kola nuts?

Uh, why are you afraid of just a dream, my son?

Baba, this is more than a dream.

Continue using the witch doctor's medicine.

If the dream persists, we will go to Sokoto in the morning to see another witch doctor.

[audience cheering] I'm lying on the floor in this hotel room.

I said, "What is it, God?" God said, "I wanted to tell you that tonight there's 300 witch doctors coming to kill you." [audience gasping] I said, "That's fine." [audience laughing] "I'm not consecrated unto life, I'm consecrated unto death." I said, "Now what? What am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to die as a martyr?" God said, "No." He said, "I'm gonna tell you how to identify them." And He showed me how to identify them, showed me the color of the clothes that they were gonna be wearing, and He showed me how to pick them out of the crowd.

[audience cheering] Then He said to me the most startling thing.

He said to me, "Son." And I never even thought about this scripture way back in 1961 and about Jeremiah.

He was wet.

[audience laughing] They speak a Creole French language.

I turned around, I put my finger in his face and I said to him, "Son," I said, "I know how you feel." I said, "But don't you dare say one word but exactly what I say." Then I told the people, I said, "People of Haiti, there are hundreds of witch doctors here tonight." And I said, "You've come to kill me." You say, "How do I know this?" I said, "Because the living God told me."

[cheering] [applauding]

That's the show I remember him from.

It was a one-season miniseries in '82 where he played a grizzled cowboy wandering around the Sahel region of Africa with his partner, Sans the Witchdoctor chimpanzee.

That show did not last long.

They pulled it after its second episode when ratings plummeted and reviews called it a "collection of stereotypes and outdated racial beliefs designed to perpetuate the myth of the white savior." Wow.