So what’s up with this yodel business?

Some facts: First of all, the best known of all yodels — you know, the one that sounds like “Yo-du-LAY-hee-hoo” — isn’t the only yodel in the book. A yodel can be just about anything a yodeler decides to yodel — if indeed, he or she is in fact yodeling. Not to get too technical about it — because, like, what do I know? I just looked here — but someone yodels when, in the course of vocalizing, they switch between what’s referred to as their “head” and “chest” voice. It’s that little abrupt change in between, and the skillfulness with which it’s done, that’s the arty part of the yodel. Though the Western stereotype of a yodeler usually involves sheep, hot chocolate and the Matterhorn in the background, yodeling isn’t exclusive to any continent or Sunnyvale-based Internet company, and the world is clearly better for it.

In the early days of Yahoo!, when budgets were small and marketing departments thought big, someone from Black Rocket, the company’s first ad agency, had a bright idea. What better way to get across the sheer fun of the Yahoo! brand than encapsulate it all within an easy-to-remember, good old fashioned yodel? And thus came yodeling cowboy Wylie Gustafson, leaving his mark on Yahoo!’s very first television commercial in April 1996 and all humanity thereafter.

That said, it wouldn’t be professionally responsible to let pass the recent release of “The Rough Guide to Yodel” without some comment. A collection of yodeling music recorded in every territory from here to — not quite, but almost — Timbuktu, this CD manages to do the unthinkable and removed the yodel from its hicks/sticks environs and position it as the art you perhaps never thought it was. Compiled by Bart Plantenga, a radio producer who’s also penned “Yodel-Ay-Ee-Oooo: The Secret History of Yodeling Around the World,” the disc features 18 tracks of the hardcore stuff, all of which goes down surprisingly easily. Recognizable names like Gillian Welch and the Fugs’ Ed Sanders sit next to an international cast including Cameroon native Francis Bebey — whose “Pygmy Divorce” borders on the ultra-surreal — Switzerland’s Christine Lauterberg, and Hawaii’s Ho’op’i Brothers, creators of the truly multi-culti “Hawaiian Cowboy.”

If it all sounds like a freak show, the surprise is: it isn’t. It’s a neatly sequenced array of music that, despite its unavoidable air of NPR programming — and you know that’s true — is completely listenable from beginning to end, and the perfect soundtrack for waiting for the cows to come home.

Which, oddly, they always do. Have you noticed?

Dave DiMartino
Executive Editor, Yahoo! Music