This book is a valuable resource for all scholars interested in the genesis of American music and for those who want to understand how musical expressions determine social aspects like class, artistic status, and hierarchy. Furthermore, this book tells the story of how a vocal practice incorporated new styles, gained independence from its European ancestors, and manifested as an American original. It is an indispensable book for scholars who write about the social aspects of voice and singing, about country music, and about cowboys in popular culture. Without a doubt, it deserves a prominent place on the bookshelves of academics with a research interest in yodelling.

Timothy Wise is an American musicologist, currently working as a senior lecturer at the University of Salford in England. He received his PhD in Music from the University of Liverpool in 2005 for his dissertation on yodelling in American popular music, which was fortunately published in its entirety in 2016. Yodeling and Meaning in American Music is structured in seven chapters plus an introduction. The book investigates the different meanings and representations of the yodel throughout American history. For his analysis, Wise uses printed music sources from the nineteenth century and focuses on the analysis of musical recordings by Jimmie Rodgers and Wilf Carter. Many of the concepts and questions raised in the book are discussed in the context of theories from Roland Barthes and Pierre Bourdieu. The book also makes reference to American philosophers and anthropologists like Arthur Lovejoy, Kenneth Pike, and Gerald Holton. The musicological analyses are inspired by the American musicologists Leonard Ratner, Raymond Monelle, and Philip Tagg (p. 13).

Timothy Wise’s research on yodelling in American popular music spans the broad cosmos of the key questions on yodelling. It puts into words the evolutionary processes and struggles of yodelling in music, as well as the associated mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion. “Always in a minority, yodelling proudly proclaims and celebrates its otherness” (p. 206). Experiences from my own research on yodelling in the Harz Mountains in Germany echo in my ear. I recognise that “otherness” Wise is describing. Against the backdrop of the perception that “the training of voice to sing comfortably and efficiently is itself a kind of technology” (p. 6), yodelling is a cultural irritation that even makes people question whether the somersaults of a voice can be a form of singing or have to be categorised differently.

The central theme of the book follows the traces of yodelling in American history in the last 200 years, starting in the early nineteenth century, when yodelling was imported by Tyrolese minstrels touring North America (p. 71ff.). Timothy Wise shows how the yodel was later socially accepted as a nostalgic image of the Alps and Switzerland, which represented a place of freedom, close to nature, pure, and intact. He also explains how yodelling managed to leave these Alpine associations behind and create an original American form of yodelling. Yodelling constantly transforms, adapts, and finds its way into new musical styles. In this process, it has also taken on new meanings. It is the cultural and social flexibility of yodelling that has secured the existence of this remarkable singing style in American music to this day. In his book, Wise shows first and foremost how yodelling succeeded in evolving into an independent American musical expression: how it disconnected from European yodelling traditions and, at the same time, absorbed Afro-American and Hawaiian aspects of music (p. 100ff.). Chapter five focuses on the so-called hillbilly yodel and examines in depth the types of yodel that Jimmie Rodgers made famous (p. 128ff.). Chapter six addresses one of the most crucial questions: how did the yodel become a joke (p. 186ff.)? Wise analyzes how the yodel became something humorous and worthy of denigration. The analysis of such a phenomenon is quite seldom in (ethno)musicological research and, for that reason, is most intriguing to explore since today’s society views the yodel as a funny and kind of embarrassing human expression. This work is not only important for US yodelling but also for similar developments in Central European yodelling, where yodelling is often associated with cheap humour. Wise explains a historical class dimension to this condescending attitude, specifically when the lower class in rural America adapted the yodel in the 1920s. Accompanied by the delimitation between people living in cities and those living in rural areas, yodelling became associated with a certain rural lifestyle in the countryside—naive, rough, and pre-modern. This is how it eventually became an object of derision.

Through in-depth research, the book reveals answers to a handful of crucial questions that can be addressed to not only American but also European yodelling: Why is yodelling excluded from classical music? Why is yodelling not accepted as an art form by mainstream society? Wise’s answers pinpoint the political and social attitudes associated with yodelling that have given it a reputation as “quasi-music, paramusic, additional, and frequently mere novelty” (p. 197). Yodelling is, of course, much more than this.