Yodeling - First Professional Yodelers in The United States

First Professional Yodelers in The United States

The American minstrel show was an entertainment consisting 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 U.S. 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 (minstrel) 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.

Companies continued to perform in both the North and South throughout the Civil War, and after the war minstrelsy remained popular. Although African Americans were forbidden by law to perform on stage with whites in many states, some companies secretly included blacks, and as laws changed several all-black minstrel companies toured America and Great Britain. Black performers still had to wear blackface makeup in order to look "dark enough," and they performed material that demeaned their own race. Despite these drawbacks, minstrelsy provided African American performers with their first professional stage outlet.

By the 1880s the minstrel show had been replaced by Vaudeville and American Burlesque. By around 1905, more than 20 years before Jimmie Rodgers introduced his blue yodel, African Americans were touring the country singing and yodeling. The most noted yodelers of that time were Monroe Tabor ("The Yodeling Bellboy" - though he was not a bellboy), Beulah Henderson (who appeared in black face), and Charles Anderson (who played a singing "mammy" and a female impersonator in several of his acts). Tabor performed with the Dandy Dixie Minstrels. In New York in 1908 a 'well-known critic' reported:

Monroe Tabor sang "A Tear, a Kiss, a Smile". Mr Tabor is a new tenor with a good voice, which suffers only from a lack of training...While there was not quite enough comedy and ragtime, the Yoodle song, "Sleep, Baby, Sleep", was greatly in atonement and showed Monroe Tabor to be unexcelled as a yoodler.

And from a 1917 review:

...and Monroe Tabor yodeled as only J K Emmett Sr, of yore could do. At the Avenue Theater in December 1917, "When My Ship Comes Sailing Home" was a fine tenor solo by Tabor, who has no superiors as a yodeler.

Known as The Jolly Hendersons, Beulah Henderson toured with her husband Billy from 1905 through 1910. Billed as "The Classy Colored Comedy Pair" Beulah was featured as "America's only Colored Lady Yodeler". In Indianapolis in 1911 manager Tim Owsley noted:

The Jolly Hendersons offered a clean, bright and snappy act of singing, talking and dancing. Each song rendered by the jolly pair won for them an encore. Mr Henderson is a real clever light comedian, while his partner, Miss Henderson, is just as clever as a singing and talking soubrette. In fact she is one of the first lady yodlers that we have had the pleasure of hearing.

Charles Anderson was touring with vaudeville as early as 1909 singing a combination of blues and yodeling. A 1913 St. Louis review reports:

The Male Mockingbird, Charles Anderson, the man with the golden voice, is some character singer, imitator, and impersonator. As an imitator, Anderson has the best on the market skinned, his violin imitation intermezzo went big, and was one of the best imitations of a musical instrument heard in this neck of the woods for many moons. "Sleep Baby Sleep", a lullaby sung in costume of an old nurse went big. The yodeling in this song was excellent. "Baby Seals Blues", as rendered by Anderson, was worth going to hear. After a quick change, Anderson reappeared as the polished gentleman and sang "When the Cuckoo Sings", instantly winning the hearts of the audience with his perfect yodehng, causing said audience to cheer like mad for more.

Country blues singer Lottie Kimbrough, billed as The Kansas City Butterball (she was a rather large woman) sang in speakeasys and nightclubs. and recorded her music from 1924 through 1929. Kimbrough's musical collaboration with Winston Holmes resulted in her best known recordings. Holmes supplied a series of yodels, vocalized bird calls and train whistles on some of their recordings.

When music critic Abbe Niles heard the Blue Yodel recordings released by Jimmie Rodgers in 1928 he was impressed by how distinctively black Rodgers' Blue Yodel recordings sounded, yodeling and all. In his opinion Rodgers was a "white man gone black". In his 1928 record review column, writing under the heading 'White man singing black songs', Niles acknowledged that Rodgers' first Blue Yodel had "started the whole epidemic of yodelling blues that now rages - though Clarence Williams wrote a good one five years ago." Niles went on to advise his readers to add race records to their collections saying, "Listening to race records is nearly the only way for white people to share the Negroes' pleasures without bothering the Negroes."

Authors Lynn Abbott & Doug Seroff write:

While some of the blue yodels heard on late 1920s Race recordings - those by the Mississippi Sheiks, for example - probably do owe something to Jimmie Rodgers' phenomenal success, others - like Billie Young's When They Get Lovin' They's Gone (accompanied by Jelly Roll Morton on Victor 23339,1930), Lottie Kimbrough and Winston Holmes' Lost Lover Blues (Gennett 6607, 1928), and Clint Jones' Mississippi Woman Blues and Blue Valley Blues (Okeh 8587, 1928) - seem more deeply connected to these precedent recordings by Charles Anderson, and to the venerable line of African-American yodelers they represent. There is no reason to doubt that Jimmie Rodgers, who could not resist a show, was exposed to and influenced by the black yodeler-blues singer tradition. Its practitioners were thoroughly entrenched in minstrelsy and vaudeville, and accessible to all races of people. Perhaps Jimmie even saw Charles Anderson himself perform, or heard some of Anderson's crystalline blues and yodeling 78s, before rising to immortality on his own great 'Blue Yodel' recordings. At any rate, the Freeman references strongly suggest that Charles Anderson and his generation of black professional yodelers had introduced the blue yodel in African-American entertainment before Jimmie Rodgers recorded.