(Rent Mars Attacks! for the results.) "This is how culture works," as someone once said, trying to explain how Jimmy Driftwood, a presumably Protestant Arkansas folksinger came to write that great song about St. Slim Whitman a near-yodeler from Florida had to move to England to get away with it. Some like Rex Dallas and Owen Blundell still do. 1 The same thing happened Down Under and Australian c&w singers kept yodeling about twenty years longer than did the Americans. The point is that, owing to the Rainers and Rainer-imitators, yodeling was on hand, ready to become an important feature of early "hillbilly" or Country-and-Western music. Edison made recorded music possible and clever promoters in Tin Pan Alley cried, "Theres gold in them thar hillbillies!" The rest is history of popular culture, with several conferences scheduled. Rainer Family imitators went down to Australia and popularized the form there. RISE AND FALL OF THE WORLDWIDE YODELING CONSPIRACYĪs the interest in montagnard studies kindled by the Romantics grew, a canny troupe of Alpine yodelers the Rainer Family hit the road in the 1840s, performing in the British Isles and North America, bringing octave-leaping to large and appreciative audiences. One thinks of Heidi and those criminally healthy Austrian girls in Herr Haiders ethnocentric posters of which weve been hearing. Mountaineers who had learned how not to take such unneeded falls were, therefore, admirably keen and sharp-witted folk, healthy as could be, and their customs well worth looking into. Anyway, the Romantics repackaged mountains as challenging if mysterious places, where your health and general outlook would take on new life, unless you fell a few hundred feet while grooving on the ambience. This experience, if we are to believe that quirky film, The Haunted Summer, inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein, when her time would have been better spent filing for divorce. This has something to do with Shelley, Byron, and their hangers-on and groupies, who spent some time in old fixer-upper castles in Switzerland. I t was the European Romantic Movement that changed our perception of mountains. THOSE MONTAGNARDS ARE UPPER-GERMAN WILHELMS NOW Maybe more firepower and high technology would have saved Hannibal, if not his brother. Of course his supply lines got a bit overextended and he was eventually mopped up by Roman forces operating as guerrillas, but thats another story, whose lesson will be clear to all who reside outside Foggy Bottom and the Pentagon. This why Hannibals feat was so great: imagine a guy slogging a big mob of Carthaginian late-term abortionists, elephants, and Celtic auxiliaries through the Alps just so he could ravage Italy for nine or ten years. And dont forget the giant Fingal, who is supposed to rescue the Scots from mortal peril but never seems to show up when needed. They were hard to cross, hard-minded people lived in them, goblins, sprites, and ghosts lived there, too, most notably Frederick the Great (in the Kyffhaeuser Mountains) and Kobold, who invented cobalt. Our European forefathers for those of us who have such thought of mountains as rather dangerous, forbidding things.
Americans tend to romanticize mountains, forgetting what our ancestors knew, namely that mountains are bloody great obstacles to migration, unless of course you decide to set up in a fairly defensible valley in the middle of them near a big tank of saltwater (of which, more shortly).
Back from rusticating in the kindly shadows of a bodacious western mountain range, I naturally grow thoughtful first of all, about mountains and music.