Australian Country Music and the Hillbilly Yodel

AUSTRALIAN COUNTRY MUSIC AND THE HILLBILLY YODEL

(Presented here is the text of the article which was published in Popular Music, vol 13, No 1, 1994, pp 297-312. It is given here for convenience of research. Copyright resides with the author and publisher, and use which exceeds fair dealing is prohibited. The original article also contains notated musical examples and pictorial illustrations not given here. Contact me by email if you are interested and have difficulty in finding the original publication)

Of the seventy five tracks issued as a historical survey of Australian country performers from 1936 to 1960, sixty eight feature a yodelling interlude, and in many the yodelling forms the main part of the performance(1). The importance of this vocal technique in Australian country music, and its persistence till the present day is a striking feature of the genre. Prominent Australian performers such as Wayne Horsborough comment that yodelling before country audiences in the USA produces reactions of amazement, for the technique has been almost totally abandoned by current American performers(2). Yet because most historical commentary on Australian country music has stressed textual development, the presence of the yodel, a wordless interlude, is often merely noted, even if with an acknowledgment of the skill of performers in this technique. And for those in the present period wishing to promote Australian country music to a broader audience, the yodel tends to be a source of embarrassment. The country music industry today is preoccupied with `throwing off the hick image' and emphasising the

broad appeal of the genre, and to many current propagandists for Australian country music yodelling is an aspect of both the history and current state of the music which condemns them to commercial unacceptability. Yet it has remained popular with audiences and a significant number of performers, and recently a telemarketed album of yodelling songs by veteran country performer Mary Schneider sold at Australian platinum levels (Latta 1991 p 150). Country music clubs, which form a backbone of committed support for the genre, frequently organise local festivals where talent quests characteristically include yodelling competitions(3).

A wide range of Country performers from America, from middle of the road Nashville stars to `new traditionalists' and `progressive country' performers have a following in Australia, but alongside of these is a local recording and live performance industry. The biggest names in Australian country locally outsell international recordings, the most prolific being the much renowned Slim Dusty, who at 65 in 1993 has made around 80 albums, been awarded 90 gold records and 20 platinum records by the Australian recording industry, amounting to 4 million Australian sales, more than twice that of Kylie Minogue (Lester 1991). Dusty and other singers in this genre use a style which defiantly defines itself as an authentic representation of the Australian experience and national identity. Its claim would be disputed by many Australians who take their cultural cues from more cosmopolitan models, for the nationalism of Australian country is often seen as politically conservative, its musical means slight, and its themes of address limited and

irrelevant. Yet it is now beginning to be recognised as the first Australian commercial popular music genre to have attempted to use a localised, national form of address before a mass, albeit a minority audience.

Historical commentary on country music in Australia has been dominated by perspectives of cultural nationalism. The books of country music historian Eric Watson construct a story of the development of an independent and authentically national genre, which has progressively freed itself from the influences of American models. The story also relates the failures of this grand destiny, in singers who ape foreign models and styles, and in the cosmopolitan commodification of country music (Watson 1983,1985,1987).

Watson's commentary is almost entirely lyric centred, for the sound of the genre lies beyond its nationalist terms of reference. I will argue that a closer examination of the musical sound of Australian country music offers perspectives beyond those of national authenticity. In particular I wish to show how the yodel in Australian country music was not a habitual and optional decoration to the main business of telling an Australian story, but a crucial and powerful part of the act of performance, a voice within which singers established the social meaning of the genre. For it is in the use of the voice, the body of the singer made audible, that those aspects of style which could be described using Raymond Williams' term `structures of feeling' are likely to be found (Shepherd 1987, Smith 1992, Williams 1965 p34). But as Leppert and Lipsitz demonstrate in their study of Hank Williams, vocal techniques are linked

with the whole pragmatics of singing performance, and to the relationship of all these to spoken language, dialect and corporeal behaviour, and so present a complex field of signs (Leppert and Lipsitz 1990). It is not to be wondered that musicologists might retreat to the easily theorised grammars of pitch and rhythm, and social historians into verbal texts. But before the voice and the yodel in Australian hillbilly music is examined, we must look at the historical evolution of the genre.

I

The musical tradition of Australian country music begins when recordings of the most popular performers of hillbilly music became available in Australia in the late 1920s. Throughout the 1920s in America, a number of genres of vernacular performance were becoming consolidated into hillbilly music, and this process reached its first pinnacle of success in the career of Jimmy Rodgers. Through recordings Australian listeners became aware of an new approach to public performance, repertoire and musical style. The most influential performers in Australia in this period were Jimmy Rodgers, the Carter family, Carson Robison and Vernhan Dalhart.

As the popularity of this music grew, a number of local performers began to imitate it, and in some cases to create their own songs in a similar style. The audience which emerged was strongly rural, particularly in the east coast of Australia.

The first performers came from professional performers from established contexts of entertainment who tried their hand at imitating an apparently simple musical genre. Some of these, such as legitimate singer and radio announcer Len Maurice recorded cover versions of Carter family and Jimmy Rodgers songs under his performing name of Art Leonard. Though these performers apparently had sufficient sales to sustain a number of releases of such material, their vocal style lacked certain of the key characteristics which marked the new hillbilly singers. The hallmark of Jimmy Rodgers vocal style was an easy intimacy. One of the first, perhaps the first performer to effectively exploit the new technology of electric recording, in his recordings Rodgers does not project his voice further than would be necessary in an average room. By contrast performers like his Australian imitator Art Leonard continued to use a legitimate light tenor delivery, and although on record he can diminish his projection from that appropriate to a concert hall, he still retains his over-precise consonants and straight jacket rhythmic sense.(4)

Though the recordings of American performers introduced the style and repertoire to Australian listeners, one local singer, Tex Morton, in the 1930s became the major interpreter of this genre and a greater influence on many performers than American models. Tex Morton, an emigrant from New Zealand, was to establish himself as the first performer to build a repertoire and career in this genre. In 1932, in his late teens he came to Australia with some experience in public performance and recording in New Zealand. He travelled with a circus, learning diverse

entertainment skills such as sharpshooting, competition boxing, whip cracking and rope tricks. In Sydney he performed on radio and eventually made a number of recordings for Australia's Columbia subsidiary, which were issued in the Regal Zonophone 20000 series. This label was the sole outlet for recorded hillbilly music in Australia until the 1950s. Touring performances built for him a strong following, and by 1937 he was one of Australia's most popular recording artists.

Much of Morton's early repertoire derived from the recordings of Jimmy Rodgers and another now lesser known solo performer of the 1920s, Goebbel Reeves. Reeves, who recorded as `the Texas Drifter' in the late 1920s and early 1930s specialised in hobo and cowboy songs. Increasingly, Morton began to write similar songs and to adapt the thematic formulae to Australian conditions. Australian place names appear, seeking the same mythological resonance that American localisation evoked: hobos became bagmen, the itinerant unemployed of 1930s Australia, cowboys became boundary riders, and so on. Gradually, this textual localisation, linked with Morton's characteristic musical style, began to take a unified shape, which was to evolve into a genre known as the bush ballad, the musical characteristics of which will be described below.

Morton's career and his evolving style inspired the second central figure of Australian hillbilly music, Buddy Williams. Inspired also by Wilf Carter and Goebbel Reeves, Williams projected a more personal tone than that of the confident and professional performer and showman Morton. Williams had come from a rural childhood marked

by orphanhood and cruel fostering. By his late teens he was an itinerant labourer and street performer, and in 1939 was accepted for recording by the A&R director at Columbia, Arch Kerr. It is likely that a number of disagreements had arisen between Columbia and their one highly successful Australian hillbilly performer, Tex Morton, and the engagement of a potential rival eventually resulted in a rift between Morton and Columbia (Smith 1990).

Buddy Williams songs used mix of musical styles and lyrical themes similar to those of Morton, and between them they were to establish the patterns of indigenous Australian hillbilly performers, enacting the same stylistic hegemonic process which Rodgers exemplified in American country music(5).

Of the loosely allied musical styles which were emerging in the USA in the 1930s to form the country music genre, cowboy songs were by far the most influential on Australian performers. Although some cowboy songs were recorded in the 1920s, a few by Jimmy Rodgers, the familiar image of the singing cowboy did not emerge until the rise of Gene Autry in 1934 (Malone 1975 p. 141, Comber and Paris 1975 p. 129). However, the figure of the cowboy was well established in popular culture before Hollywood, and in Australia in particular, the western novels of the US author Zane Grey (1875-1939) were extremely popular with Australian readers in the first thirty years of the twentieth century (Lyons and Taska 1992 p. 55). The western films of Gene Autry provided substantial models for dress, deportment and performer attitude and gave Australian singers a

model for performance; almost all Australian performers based their persona on the singing cowboy.

However, what they produced musically was less like the smooth Hollywood influenced songs of Gene Autry, with their arranged instrumental backings and velvety voice, than those of other cowboy singer models such as Goebell Reeves and Wilf Carter, and another Nova Scotian singer to embrace the cowboy image, Hank Snow. The influence of these singers gave cowboy music a characteristic slant in Australia. Reeves gave Australian singers an interest in singing about the vagrant culture of the hobo, or translated to Australia, the bagman and itinerant rural worker. Carter was taken on as a producer of direct narrative songs, centred in a mythologised west - Carter being a Nova Scotian. Both of these singers were notable for their yodelling, a hallmark of cowboy music.

Like many of the Australian singers who were to follow this genre, Carter had come from a working background on cattle farms to become a tireless propagator of the cowboy image. Though many critics have scorned the Hollywood fabrications which were popularised in the 1930s, there is no question of the immense attractiveness of these images. And although there was a great distance between the concrete reality of Australian rural work and the romantic image of the cowboy hero, the new world pastorale of the cowboy song allowed an identification founded in something of its rural listeners' experience, when it defined itself in contrast to metropolitan norms.

Both Morton and Williams established touring rodeo shows and these performance contexts became an accepted setting for the musical style. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s these shows travelled through rural Australia, where, though the economic importance of the horse was declining in many areas, equestrian skills were still popularly cultivated and celebrated. Just as the shows invited local riders to compete and perform, they also presented the new local form of cowboy music to an audience as a genre for self expression and public performance.

The performances of singers such as Buddy Williams and Tex Morton were the model for a new form of musical expression for young rural Australians in the 1940s. Australian country music's most prolific historian, Eric Watson, eloquently describes the impact of the music on himself and other young people of the dairying belt of northern New South Wales. Not only was their main interest the new hillbilly music, but all were trying to perform it, casually in private or in public, and many were writing songs in the idiom. For Watson it was `a spontaneous and quite inspiring flowering of what I consider to be a genuine folk movement.. and it happened simultaneously all over the country' (Watson 1987 p 57) The appeal of this music certainly was widespread, but the emergence of many singers from this area of NSW and southern Queensland suggests that it was among the small farmers of the dairying industry that the music held its greatest appeal. Young men from this rural industry were often on relatively unprofitable family farms. They were tied to endless work in relative isolation, yet due to the perishable nature of dairy products, were in areas

which were fairly closely settled, and in contact with local towns with marketing and processing establishments. These were the social and geographical prerequisites for the development of the musical form. Furthermore, the romanticised West had a special appeal to dairy farmers. Though they were cowboys of a completely different sort, using different skills to those depicted in the cowboy songs, they were still able to identify the mythologised west as part of the great outside world beyond the farm in which they had a privileged place.

Within this movement a style developed which took firmer shape during the 1940s and 1950s through the work of such performers as Gordon Parsons, Reg Lindsay and the legendary Slim Dusty. This local form of hillbilly music performance became known as the bush ballad.

The bush ballad now occupies only a part of the stylistic range of country music in Australia, but it is the most important style in the genre's self definition. In the bush ballad, a range of usually romanticised images of rural life are presented. Rarely is there a direct narrative beyond the placement of the singer within this social and geographical landscape. The use of the term bush ballad, which is also associated with narrative Australian popular verse of the late nineteenth century, is a relatively recent coining.

The musical means of the bush ballad have usually been seen as little more than a vehicle for the text, and even for a sympathetic commentary, Australian country music has had `no particular harmonic or melodic strength' (Brisbane 1991 p.

232)

The bush ballad form uses symmetrical, diatonic melodies, usually to set a regular 4 line narrative ballad verse. Guitar accompaniment is conventionally bass-chord alternation, in the standard open position keys of C, G, D and A. Bass notes alternate between root and the fifth, and short scalar runs may be used between the roots of changing chords. Some performers executed all this with a thumb pick, which gives a clear strummed chord, but greatly restricts melodic versatility.

But the bush ballad is only seen as musically self effacing because one of the key musical elements of the genre, the yodel, has been pointedly ignored by commentators. Given the unfashionability of this vocal style, this is not surprising.

Yodelling came to take the role of the major ornamental feature of a relatively direct vocal presentation of simple melodies. In the absence of virtuosic instrumental performance or vocal display, the yodel provided a musical framing, a display of vocal virtuosity, and came to carry much of the symbolic weight of genre identification and definition.

Yodels are used within many musical styles and signalling systems in diverse cultures, the key feature of the technique being a controlled alternation between two vocal timbres. That a voice may use a number of registers produced by different physical techniques is universal recognised by singers and voice trainers, but the subjective and aural categories of voice production

are difficult to relate to observable acoustical and physiological phenomena. (Sundberg 1977, Saunders 1977, Butenschn and Borchgrevink 1982 p 32). However, western bel canto and associated vocal styles aim to minimise the timbral contrast between ranges of the voice and stress the unification of registers, while the yodel aims to accentuate the contrast between the `head' and `chest' voice used. Through the leaps over intervals of at least a fifth, often associated with vowel changes, the singer emphasises the disjunction between two voices, and makes the `break' between the two registers a means of pitch articulation and attack. Distinct breaks, and fast alternations between the two registers can give the effect of a momentary overlap of the two pitches, resulting in an apparent harmonic effect. Yodellers wishing to emphasise this stress the importance of accurate intervals; the leaps and alternations do not usually allow sliding onto a note. Within the country music tradition, yodels are almost always set to conventional meaningless syllables, the instantly recognised yodel-ay-ee, as well as others. The resonating formants of the vocal tract associated with the vowel changes are linked to the voice break, perhaps modifying the modes of vibration in the vocal folds, and so facilitating the change of register.(6)

The yodel became strongly associated with country music genres, particular with cowboy music of the 1930s, and it is often assumed that the musical technique was associated with such performances in their pre-commercial form. However, Coltman, suggests a more complex history, as there is little evidence that vernacular cowboy singers of the pre-recording era used yodelling, and he attributes

the place which the yodel took in the strophic narrative song of country music to the influence of Jimmy Rodgers. As in much of the historical impact of Rodgers, his great achievement was to make his individual innovation seem established and natural. Where Rodgers got his inspiration for the yodel in not clear, but Coltman suggests that he was borrowing a well recognised vocal style from the popular theatre and performance practice of the time. (Coltman 1976)

II

The yodel which entered western urban popular music was a formalisation of the techniques used by Tyrolian and Swiss rural musicians, particularly as was developed in the urbanised Swiss folkloristic genres which were created in the nineteenth century (Baumann 1980 p. 421). Audiences in the English speaking world were introduced to the yodel through the theatrical career of a Tyrolese singing group, the Rainer family, around the 1840s and 1850s. This `family' group, often reinforced with non family members become the rage of British and American stages with their tight harmonies and bravura yodelling of their national-style melodies, delivered with relatively little operatic projection but within a polished ensemble performance. They lead the stream of American family singing groups which remained popular through the nineteenth century (Nathan 1946). Their yodelling became the model of many imitations and burlesques, and became absorbed into the minstrel show repertoire, and by the 1850s a minstrel troupe styling themselves

Rainer's Original Ethiopian Serenaders toured gold rush Australia as well as the rest of the world(7).

From this cultural position the yodel was presented to broader audiences within minstrel shows, vaudeville and music hall, and yodellers were part of popular entertainment alongside other ethnically defined performers with a spectacular musical performance to present to audiences. Frequently associated with comic grotesques of the popular stage, it became a technical resource upon which other styles could draw, though maintaining the cultural associations of its origins in the European alpine regions. The yodel as an emblem of alpine life, projected images of wholesomeness and natural beauty. The alps were part of the rediscovered natural Europe of the nineteenth century English late romantic imagination, and this cultural background provided the space within which the swiss yodel could develop its place. The musical and social correlates of the yodel were a strict diatonicism, and an accompanying association with an outdoor romanticism and rural nostalgia.

In Australia, in the period immediately predating the access to hillbilly and cowboy music, performers and audiences were quite familiar with the yodel in a context of popular entertainment. A 1927 recording of Harry Cash, a theatrical performer singing `The Black Yodel', illustrates a typical siting of the yodel(8). This recording of a comic song in minstrel show style, has the performer addressing imagined members of the audience in a bouncy music-hall 6/8, with a yodel refrain in between lines of a symmetrically structured song, and shows no evidence of the

influence of hillbilly models. Rather, this is an example of the well established place that the yodel had in popular entertainment.

Rodgers and the American yodellers of the hillbilly era both adopted and reinterpreted the yodel. Recordings, particularly of ethnic, `race' and `hillbilly' music had brought into public prominence a variety of vocal styles. Alpine models gained new meanings when brought into proximity with the hollers, whoops and howls of vernacular vocal techniques used by both white and black American singers. Jimmy Rodgers recorded as `the Blue Yodeller', his yodel has been described as `a cry of pain and anguish' and Rodgers was able to imply a degree of emotional tension within the voice where the threat of a break is always present (Green 1977). This became one of the key corporeal musical meanings of the country yodel, and one that underwrote the development of country vocal styles despite their abandonment of the overt yodel in following decades.

Though the earliest performers of Australian hillbilly music were centrally influenced by Jimmy Rodgers, they did not closely reproduce his style of vocal projection, nor emphasise these aspects of his performance, nor use the yodel in this way. It may be that the absence of afro-american performance models in Australia led to a different reception for Rodgers music, but his links with the blues had no apparent impact on Australian imitators, and his sentimental and celebratory songs were most influential.

Thus it was the swiss yodel rather than the blue yodel which inspired Australian performers. This

meant they used faster alternations of pitches within an athletic and lively vocal presence. Australian textual localisation added another complexity to this cultural project, and some early songs mixed apparently incongruous images of the American wild west, the Australian outback and the Swiss alps.

But to focus merely on the connotative associations of the yodel, along with the lyrics and settings of the songs masks the more important aspect of the yodel in the genre. In performance, the primary role of the yodel stemmed from its powerful contrast with the other stylistic features of hillbilly performance. It could be outlandish where the rest of the song was restrained by a narrative directness, and it was a place to give a virtuosic display of vocal ability. This was in great contrast to the relatively underdeveloped simplicity of the instrumental accompaniments used by these singers, and it took the place of instrumental interludes. It framed the performance, providing with introduction and conclusion, and in doing so framed the performer away from the audience; establishing the separation which gives the performer the right to behave in a way different from the audience, and thus to be granted the right to articulate aspects of the lives of the audience members in ways which they would not themselves do. On one of his wartime radio shows Tex Morton banters with an imagined listener who has sent him `something for his throat' - which turns out to be a cut-throat razor. To thumb his nose at his supposed enemy, Morton breaks into his next song with a most extravagant yodel, complete with trills and gargles, clearly using this to signal his right to occupy the role of performer(9).

III

Yodels were generally used as interludes between verses or as introductions. They almost always consisted of a number of relatively stereotypic melodic movements, and usually bore no specific melodic relationship to the verse melody. As such they were assembled from constituent modules, such as a series of intervals outlining a harmonic cadence. The simpler forms used sequential series of consonant intervals, such as the simple cadential form much used by Rodgers, particularly in his blue yodels, shown in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1: Rodgers sequential sixths yodel

Rodger's yodelling was relatively simple and direct. Also, he did not emphasise a separation between his yodel and various other of his vocal techniques. The break is not generally accentuated, and other lightenings and breaks in his voice are frequent within his performance. Occasionally he ventures his falsetto higher than a above middle c, but more often the upper notes of his yodel are scarcely above the singing range of his standard voice.

By contrast, Tex Morton had an exhibitionist and virtuosic approach to his yodelling. Often featured as the introduction to a song, the yodel contained much more than a few plaintive or laconic syllables. Uvular and tongued trills were used to

create unusual effects. Swiss stylings such as rapid alternations between the two pitches are often used. Figure 2 shows one of his yodels from his song `The Yodelling Bagman', recorded in 1936. In the verses of this song Morton swings easily between the central melody played on a mouth organ and a number of melodic variations, and he intersperses yodelling interludes such as this between verses. At the fast and bouncy tempo his sequential pattern at bars 9 and 10 is effortless and accurate. His tongue trilled r's are heard in bars 2 and 6.

Figure 2 Yodel from Tex Morton from `The Yodelling Bagman' (Tex Morton) (c) 1937 EMI Music reproduced with permission

Buddy Williams used a much less confident and flexible voice than that of Morton. By doing so he could project a personal directness which Morton's authoritative style did not display. William's early songs are replete with slides and slurs, with liberal use of anticipatory vocal breaks in his attack on individual words. Though the emotional range of the bush ballad compared with, say, American honky-tonk styles was restrained, William's work established ways in which vocal effects similar to those of the American `hard country' voice could be meaningfully used. Williams eloquently established how his yodel should be read in his Australian Bushman's Yodel, the first verse and yodel of which are shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3 The Australian Bushman's Yodel Verse 1 and Yodel Buddy Williams (C) 1940 Allans Music Australia. Reproduced with permission.

The lyrics of this song set forth a nostalgic idealised image of the life of the bushman - an indistinct social role, but it is implied that the voice of the song leads a hermetic life of unspecified rural labour, whether a small freeholder or an isolated employee. Behind the praising of the natural world is a plaintive acceptance of social isolation. The claim that the simple pleasures of this life compensate for the emotional costs of isolation is somewhat called into question by the vocal style and technique used by Williams. He has few melodic flourishes, as the tune moves stepwise over its range of less than one octave. The two points of emotional focus in the basic melody are the falling thirds, particularly on the final interval, where it is easy to recognise the evocation of resignation. The falling interval here also echoes the effect of William's vocal break, and executed with a pitch slide, its emotional significance is intensified. But, delivered in a voice not far removed from speech, these effects are fairly subtly acheived. The yodel, on the other hand, is more musically ambitious. Here Williams substitutes the Australian bush signal call of `cooee' for the conventional yodel syllables. The cooee, apparently first taken by European from New South Wales aborigines in the first years of white invasion of the continent, came in the nineteenth century to be a well established symbol of a naturalistic nationalism. Its musical possibilities were exploited by at least one

composer in the nineteenth century (Covell 1967 p. 69). In Buddy William's song, though, the exploitation of the cooee is of greater significance than in the nineteenth century attempts to incorporate national symbols into a musical work. The linking of the yodel, the bush, the performer and the audience was one of the key tasks to be undertaken in the establishment of the social meanings of the new genre of the bush ballad. For in this period of the development of Australian country music, the roles of performer and audience were particularly labile. Performers such as Morton and Williams were not only attempting to create material which could resonate with the experiences of their audiences and themselves, but were trying to establish a language of naturalistic song projection which hitherto had not been available.

In the 1940s and 1950s yodelling was inseparable from hillbilly music. Two young women singers from southern Queensland, Shirley Thoms and June Holms, produced a number of particularly popular recordings, mainly based on yodelling cowgirl themes popularised by American singer Patsy Montana, or on idyllic evocations of a local landscape. These are described by Watson as `impossibly naive and over romanticised', and he adds that they carry the escapist theme to its limit (Watson 1987 p 60). This stream of the Australian hillbilly yodel cannot be easily fitted into the narrative of the development of a realist descriptive bush ballad. However, listened to for clarity of singing, for vocal agility and for the direct power of these voices, still in their teens, it is not hard to see why these singers were popular. Thoms sold over 12,000 copes of her 1941

recordings in that year; for comparison Bing Crosbie sold about 10,000 copies of White Christmas in Australia in 1943(10).

Most interpretations of Australian country music have followed Watson in emphasising the progressive independence from American models of performance. But the same struggles to create an effective voice are also closely allied to the need to establish the status of performer and audience, and define both the nature of their affinity and the boundary between them. Touring singers were outside the social groups to which they performed, yet had to emphasise their authority to act as musical voices for a constituency, primarily of small farmers and rural workers. Watson's description of their impact cited above illustrates that they were particularly effective in this. The American hillbilly singer has been seen as an organic intellectual of a poor white constituency, but this analysis assumes a well defined role for the singer, and a tradition-based genre which is unproblematically understood as speaking for its audience (Patterson 1975). Australian hillbilly performers could not assume this role or such a genre, but had to construct it. Each song and each performance were part of establishing a right to perform in a particular way. Yodelling, as the most technically significant part of the performance asserted the authority of the singer. Once this was accepted, the singer's interpretation and construction of `ordinary' experience could be taken seriously.

But, under the influence of the post-war Nashville re-packaging of the genre, in 1956 recording companies renamed yodelling and hillbilly songs

country and western, as shown in recording catalogues of the period (see Figure 4). From the late 1950s, under the influence of American models, songs without yodels became more common. The bush ballad form gained greater narrative confidence, particularly in the recordings of Slim Dusty, who drew from several other songwriters. Many of these songwriters saw themselves as continuing the narrative verse tradition established by the popular poets of the 1890s Henry Lawson and A.B. Paterson. These shifts reflect a penetration of new approaches to the relationships between national identity and the rural experience which emerged in the 1950s. A radical intelligentsia of the period nurtured a left populist reading of the outback and its historical nineteenth century labour force, a vision most influentially represented by the publication of Russel Ward's The Australian Legend (Ward 1966). While the radical implications `the Australian legend' were not necessarily accepted by country music songwriters or by many other Australians of the 1950s and 1960s, a new historicisation of Australian rurality was being constructed in this period, dominated more by an urban romanticisation of a time and place which is imagined as the source of the Australian national character and culture. In contrast to this the yodel in the hillbilly song was part of another ideological construction of the countryside, linked to a defensive redefinition of current rural experience. The social placement of the yodel is more closely linked to the ideology identified by Aitkin as `countrymindedness', where `the characteristic Australian is a countryman, and the core elements of national character come from the struggles of country people to tame the environment and make

it productive' (Aitken 1988 p. 51) . For in espousing a plein-air celebration of nature, even when documenting its climatic harshnesses, the yodel's outback was a landscape containing a solitary figure. The outback of the Australian legend was essentially a landscape of social relations, and in fundamental contradiction to the yodeller's vision. It is little wonder that cosmopolitan taste should find it the least acceptable part of country music.

Figure 4. Australian retail recording catalogue covers, July 1956 and August 1957(11).

Yet yodellers persist in Australian country music. This may be seen as an example of the conservativeness of country music fans in Australia, and the continuing hold of formations of popular taste relatively impervious to precepts of the music industry and unconcerned with an educated aesthetic. But the number of young active yodelling performers would suggest that it is not mere generational nostalgia at work here. Further, yodelling remains a technique against which other singers position themselves. Curiously, the figures which currently define themselves most strongly against the yodelling hillbillies of the 1940s are singers of a sub-genre known as Australiana, who produce songs of a kind of intense down-homey ruralist nationalism, which on the face of it would appear to be the current form closest to the hillbilly bush ballad tradition. Yet, in general, contemporary Australiana singers, such as Colin Buchanan and John Williamson aim at an

extremely understated vocalisation, sometimes barely above a pitched speech. These attempts to sing the Australian accent and dialect, and to strip country of all its American-identified trappings leave no space for the extravagance of the yodel or the sentimental theatricality of the country voice (Glover 1993 p 16). Even though these singers have moved far from the yodel, its phantom still haunts them. This is merely one manifestation of the tensions within Australian country music, where ideologies of rurality, countrymindedness and radical nostalgia, defensive rural chauvinism and cosmopolitan populism are in continual conflict. Performers such as bush balladeers, bush bands, yodellers and urban progressives seek to outline a cultural place for themselves in ways which are often contradictory. The significance of their differences is known by fans and listeners as they feel it in the voice and the sound of the music, but is little understood. This historical study of the yodel might provide a starting point for investigations into the sound of Australian country music to move analytic interpretations closer to some of the felt experiences of the genre.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Peter Burgis, David Crisp, Marcus Breen and John Whiteoak for information and material used in preparing this article.

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Discography

Country Music in Australia (various artists) Produced by Eric Watson and Warren Fahey. Selection Records PRD 003 1977

Country Music in Australia 1936-1959. The Regal-Rodeo Collection EMI 8140902 1993.

Morton, Tex Showtime Radio Kingfisher AUS-7, 1993

Australian Hillbilly Music:1926-1933. Kingfisher Cassettes KF AUS-12

1. Country Music in Australia 1936-1959. The Regal Rodeo Collection EMI 8140902. This 3 CD compilation is the most easily accessible source of the range of music discussed in this article. Another useful source is Country Music in Australia Selection Records PRD 003.

2. Phone interview with Wayne Horsborough 7 April 1993.

3. For examples of these perspectives and attitudes, see any recent issues of the semi-official country music monthly Capital News (Tamworth)

4. See for example his performance of "The Big Rock Candy Mountains" reissued on Australian Hillbilly Music: 1926-1933

5. For the idea of the historical creation of a hegemonic style in popular music genres, see Keil 1985, especially p. 126-7.

6. Coltman quotes a yodeller's suggestion that in the falsetto voice the vocal folds vibrate to produce the first harmonic partial. Though this is unlikely to be physically accurate it suggests something of the feel of the voice in the throat (Coltman 1976 p 91).

7. See review and advertisements in The Argus (Melbourne) May 27 1853.

8. Reissued on Australian Hillbilly Music: 1926-1933. Kingfisher Cassettes KF AUS-12.

9. Tex Morton Showtime Radio Kingfisher Cassettes

AUS-7. Side A, item 1(c). This recording is of compiled from extracts from surviving radio discs of 1939-1945.

10. These sales figures come from the EMI archive, National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra. I am indebted to Marcus Breen for them.

11. From the collection of David Crisp.