Tootle of a Devilish Song
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How did Swiss yodeling travel from a Basel folk festival into country music?
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.
I'm coming up here to the Münsterplatz. This is the big cathedral in the square. That's reporter and Basel resident Gabe Bullard. There's a group here of people in their traditional outfits, the dark pants, white shirts, suspenders with idol vise.
But this isn't everyday Basel. Gabe is attending a celebration of Swiss folk music that happens every three years called Jotlerfest.
Yodeler Fest 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 heat wave. 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.
Some people here have been yodeling all their lives, like Anita Fieliger from central Switzerland.
Yeah, I'm a mountain girl. I have seven sisters and brothers. And then we take yodeling and music as far as a hobby and family.
Others are here to just bask in the sounds, like Francisca Morgan and 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.
Francisca 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.
That was wonderful. Thank you so much.
Yodlerfest 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.
But beyond Yodelerfest 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.
How does yodeling work, and what are the origins of the Alpine tradition?
I don't know what I do. All I do is say hi, hi, ho.
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.
The yodel is a singing technique where we use the different registers. So, for example, the head voice. Or the chest voice. And very typical for yodeling is to switch between that to...
Nadia Ras is one of the leading voices, metaphorically and literally, of Swiss yodeling today. 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.
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.
Despite what we know about its regional variations, the origins of the alpine yodel are shrouded in mountain mist.
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. This
is Yannick Way, a musicologist who has studied Alpine music. He also plays the alphorn, you know, the horns that the guys play in the Regula commercials. Yannick says that some of the earliest yodelers were probably cattle herders in the Alps. And one of the earliest possible references to yodeling is a document from around the year 400 that describes some Alpine singing as, quote, Yuyulate Carmine Diaboli, which an Austrian folklorist in the 20th century translated as Toodle of a Devilish Song.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
How did Swiss yodeling travel from a Basel folk festival into country music?
0:01–3:06
2
How does yodeling work, and what are the origins of the Alpine tradition?
3:06–7:02
3
How did Swiss tourism turn yodeling from a cattle call into a performance?
7:02–10:28
4
How did European yodeling reach the United States and mix with American music?
10:28–12:01
5
How did Jimmie Rodgers combine Alpine yodeling and blues to help create country music?
12:01–17:58
6
Why did yodeling evolve differently in American country music and wartime Switzerland?
17:58–22:12
7
How are young Swiss artists preserving and reinventing yodeling today?
22:12–25:46
8
What do early American yodel recordings reveal about yodeling’s forgotten history?
25:46–32:14