Yodeling

The form of singing has evolved into its own musical genre.

Yodeling became popular internationally by the music film The Sound of Music.

Okay, this doesn't sound like yodeling to me.

Try it, Tony.

Song is called Gonna Make That Woman Mine.

And then Kendall Street Company with My Captain, their second single of the album Yodeling Astro Man.

That's gonna come out this week on September the 25th, and the album comes out on October 23.

And then Pam Ross with a single called Lost in Heaven.

Here's Franz Lang, also known as the yodel king.

Yodeling involves using vocables to jump between different registers.

If you've heard people talk about head voice or chest voice or falsetto, those are registers.

While the vowels that yodelers use are crucial, the consonants are also important.

Bart Plantenga, and if I'm mispronouncing his name, please let me know, who is considered a world expert on yodeling, says, consonants are used as levers to launch the dramatic leap from low to high, giving it its unique ear-penetrating and distance-spanning power.

In the 1890 work Yodeling and Yodeling Song in Appenzell, Alfred Tobler writes that the earliest reference to yodeling in Europe can be traced to 1545.

Like Tuvan throat singing, it is linked to nomadic pastoralism.

Livestock would be allowed to wander far from the town or city that claimed them, and the shepherds and cowherds would travel with them.

This was when, um, W-Chief Operations, Walter Varlamont, um...

he contacted Yodel and said, you know, or who was then, uh, it was then, um, chief of operations of OKW.

Varlamont, you know, said, um, you know, can you, have you heard of the Fuhrer that declared war on America? You know, Yodel said yes.

And, um, according to Varlamont, like Yodel was like white as a sheet, you know, and said that, you know, now the, the, the, you know, the, The General Staff is charged with, you know, now we have to examine where the United States is most likely to employ the bulk of our forces initially, whether it's the Far East or Europe.

And we can't take further decisions until that has been clarified.

Verlamont replied, well, he said this is obviously a necessary decision.

You know, we can hardly undertake this job just like that.

Hitler fired Verlamont when he heard of this and said he never wanted to see him again or speak to him.

You know, like, uh, like, yelling and, like, slamming his fist on the desk and, like, visibly, like, agitated and angry, because despite what Hollywood suggests, like, Hitler wasn't, that wasn't his nature.

Um, but that, um, he, uh, summoned, uh, Keitel and Yodel immediately.

um, he apparently, uh, called himself down and he said that, you know, owing a course, not just to his Austrian upbringing, but his experience in the great war, you know, he said that, you know, chauvinistic Serbs, you know, they've always been, um, they've always been responsible for, you know, catastrophes at scale, you know, and, uh, They're doing this again.

And this will not stand.

You know, like, the Germans...

Whether you're talking about the OKW, whether you're talking, like, this is a rare example of a quorum.

You had Hitler, you had Huell, you had Van Brausch, you had Ribbentrop, you had Yodel, you had Keitel.

Basically, everybody who later on, you know, basically by December 41, there was like a total fracturing here of worldview.

I'm getting way off on a tangent.

But there's a similar aesthetic in the Alporn and Yodeling communities, especially the Appenzeller style of Yodeling.

That style is wordless and very languid and relaxed.

And ironically, not nearly as ornamented as the Irish music I favor.

Chamberlain issues a somewhat cryptic statement that, you know, that London will not sit idly while an invasion is staged by Germany of any sovereign state.

Now, Hitler was genuinely kind of, dumbfounded by this because there there was no intention to assault czechoslovakia and there had been no deployment on onto the frontier um hitler is convinced that uh you know this might be some kind of ledger domain originating in moscow he doesn't know what to think um Yodel, General Oberst, I'm sure I butchered that pronunciation too.

Yodel was, by this point, was not a particularly close ally of Hitler, although subsequently he became very close.

He ended up becoming a very powerful figure on the general staff.

We know a lot about what transpired here because of what he relayed, and he really had no reason to lie.

Now this is just kind of how battle developed.

Okay.

If you've got a dedicated armored, uh, element in your, uh, in your ground forces, it's not like somebody sat down, you know, whether it's not like Erwin Rommel or Yodel or, uh, or, um, von Manstein sat down and said, okay, the theory of warfare, it's called blitzkrieg.