Art by Michael Zhang.
This episode was written & produced by Andrew Anderson and Casey Emmerling.
It’s one of the quirkiest, most iconic sonic logos ever: a four-note vocal flourish that defined the early internet. In this episode, we follow the Yahoo Yodel on its unlikely journey from the snowy Swiss Alps to ‘90s country bars to Super Bowl ads. Along the way, we meet the real-life cowboy behind this yodel, whose voice launched a billion clicks... as well a high-stakes legal battle. Featuring musician and yodeler Wylie Gustafson.
MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE
nickpanek620 - Fast Banjo Tune with Acoustic Guitar Accompaniment
Caroline Boissier-Butini ‘Swiss' Piano Concerto No 6
Roy Edwin WIlliams - Roger and Marty
Wylie & The Wild West - I'm Gonna Be a Cowboy
STRLGHT - I Feel Like
Heyday Highway - Drunken Lullaby
Brett Gregory - Friends and Family
Roy Williams - Coconut Cowboy
Roy Edwin Williams - Countrypolitan
Roy Edwin Williams - High Country
Arch Tremors - Goodbye Memory Lane
Wylie and The Wild West - Yodeling Fool (Live at The Tractor)
Roy Edwin Williams - Spring Pickin'
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View Transcript ▶︎
Wylie: This is Twenty Thousand Hertz with Dallas Taylor.
[sfx: nickpanek620 - Fast Banjo Tune with Acoustic Guitar Accompaniment]
The voice you just heard is one of the most famous pop culture voices of the last thirty years... Thanks to this.
[Yahoo yodel]
But to tell his story, we have to rewind about 500 years to the wild and crazy world...
…of the beautiful Swiss alps.
[music in: Caroline Boissier-Butini ‘Swiss' Piano Concerto No 6]
[sfx: nature sounds, chirping birds]
Back then, the Swiss alps looked pretty much exactly as you might imagine. Snow. Little wooden houses. Plenty of sheep. [sfx: baah] And of course, yodeling. Here's a Swiss yodeler named Amadé Perrig doing a traditional yodel.
[clip: Amadé Perrig yodeling]
**Musically, yodelling is defined by rapid changes between your normal voice and falsetto. It started as a way for Swiss shepherds to call one another across the mountains.
[Amadé up, then out]
But not only was it a practical way to communicate, people just loved the way it sounded. Over the centuries, yodeling made its way into other European countries, and then started to show up in early popular music.
Here's a tune from 1911 called 'Emmett's Favorite Yodel', by British vaudeville performer George Watson.
[clip: George Watson - Emmett’s Favorite Yodel]
When Europeans started migrating to America, they brought yodelling with them. As a result, a bunch of early US records feature yodelling. This includes many songs by country artists like Jimmie Rodgers, one of the genre's first superstars.
[clip: Jimmie Rodgers - Blue Yodel]
In the late 40s, Hank Williams continued this tradition with songs like Lovesick Blues.
[clip: Hank Williams - Lovesick Blues]
Since then, yodelling has continued to pop up in surprising places, like a recurring segment on the Price is Right called Cliff Hangers.
[clip: Cliff Hangers theme]
As well as tracks by Jewel...
[clip: Jewel - Chime Bells]
And even Gwen Stefani.
[clip: Gwen Stefani - Wind It Up]
Which brings us to yodeling maestro Wylie Gustafson.
Wylie: [Yodeling]
[music in: Roy Edwin WIlliams - Roger and Marty]
Wylie grew up on a ranch in Montana, with three brothers and a sister. Their father was a veterinarian for farm animals, and also a musician.
Wylie: He had a really unique repertoire of old folk songs and obscure, funny, humorous songs. skiing songs, songs... So we grew up in the family living room, singing along with all these funny old folk songs.
Once in a while, he'd play an old cowboy song that included yodeling.
Wylie: My dad would yodel whenever he was happy. And being on a ranch, we were horseback all the time, that was one of his favorite places to yodel. He also was a great snow skier. So when he was up on the ski hill, he would let out a yodel.
Wylie: So, you know, I just adored my father, so I always tried to mimic him. So when he started yodeling, I tried to start yodeling and, I think I was 12 or 13 when my voice broke enough to where I was kind of in my adult voice where I could yodel pretty good.
[music out]
In highschool, Wylie started playing bass in his older brother's band. And occasionally, he'd sing too.
Wylie: One of the songs that I learned how to sing was a song called, “She Slid Down the Mountain,” and the words are…
[clip: Cathy Fink - Grandma Slid Down the Mountain]
Wylie: So I could do that song in our set. And that always got a chuckle from a lot of the people listening.
In his twenties, Wylie moved to Los Angeles to pursue music. He formed a band called Wylie and the Wild West Show. But they weren't interested in playing what was popular on country radio at the time.
Wylie: In the ‘90s, I think there was a lot of horrible music out there. And I was almost embarrassed to call myself a country music artist, because people would automatically think of some of the bad country artists at the time. So we always called ourselves like, "Traditional Country" or "Western Swing." We chose that path of, "Okay, we're not gonna write commercial country music."
But to really set his band apart, Wylie needed something more than just a vintage sound. Then one night at a bar, he got on stage and belted out a classic yodel. Everyone put down their drinks, and listened close. And from then on, yodeling became his signature.
[music in: Wylie & The Wild West - I'm Gonna Be a Cowboy]
Wylie: In 1992, we got a record deal and had our music videos playing on Country Music Television and the Nashville Network. Country Music Television was... it was like MTV of its day. It was 24 hours a day music videos. And so we had a few songs that became really popular on Country Music Television, and it kind of catapulted our career to a different level.
[music up, then out]
While Wylie and the Wild West were gaining traction, a brand new technology was taking the world by storm.
News Clip: It spans the globe like a super highway, and is called “internet.” The net is made up of some 12,000 individual computer networks.
[music in: STRLGHT - I Feel Like]
Back then, the internet was a pretty different place. Youtube, Spotify, Instagram, and TikTok were still years away from existence. Amazon was just for buying books. But one thing the early internet did have was search engines. Lots of them.
[list ramps up]
There was Archie, Veronica, Jughead, Wandex, JumpStation, Aliweb, WebCrawler, Lycos, Infoseek, Excite, AltaVista, OpenText…
[music pause]
Now, there's one big name missing from that list. And no, it's not Google. That didn't come along until 1998. The real MVP of the early internet was Yahoo.
[music resumes]
Yahoo was founded in 1994. One year later, it was the world's second most visited website. And I say website, because Yahoo wasn't really a search engine... at least not at first. It was actually a curated directory. That sounds fancy, but it actually just meant a list of websites that were safe to use.
This was important, because back then it was pretty easy to hack into a computer... which helps explain why hacking was a central part of so many 90's movies.
[music fade into 90s hacking montage]
So Yahoo made the internet feel safe and friendly, rather than scary and confusing. Even the name Yahoo sounded playful compared to the techie names like Infoseek or WebCrawler. Here's Yahoo founders Jerry Yang and David Filo in a 1995 interview with CNET.
David Filo: I mean, we consider ourselves a couple Yahoos. And it’s pretty fitting, to, I think, the site, and the internet in general.
Yahoo wanted to convey that fun, playful attitude in their branding. Meanwhile, yodeling was having a bit of a resurgence. There were the famous Ricola commercials that featured people singing the brand's name on a Swiss hilltop.
[clip: Ricola commercial]
Even though they weren't using any falsetto, it was clearly meant to be a yodel.
[clip: Ricola commercial]
Jello advertised their new Jello yogurt by claiming it would make you yodel.
[clip: Jello Yogurt]
In Wisconsin, Shorewest Realtors ran a popular commercial set to a chicken yodel, by yodeler Kerry Christensen.
[clip: Shorewest Realtors]
Down in Australia, there was a country-techno song called Tighten Up Your Pants that reached number 3 on the dance music charts.
[clip: Audio Murphy Inc. - Tighten Up Your Pants]
And with his yodelling chops, it wasn't long before Wylie got in on the action.
Wylie: In that era, I was doing lots of commercials yodeling. I think I was one of the only yodelers in LA at the time. That's when I was doing the Taco Bell commercials and Miller Light commercials with yodeling.
Sadly, most of these ads have disappeared into the mists of time... But if I had to guess why yodelling made a mini comeback in the 90's, it’s probably because the whole decade was obsessed with repackaging old cultural quirks.
For example, there was the swing revival, which included hit songs like “Zoot Suit Riot.”
[clip: Zoot Suit Riot]
There was also a surf rock revival. It was a trend that Quentin Tarrantino helped spark by opening Pulp Fiction with a classic surf track by Dick Dale.
[clip: Dick Dale - Miserlou]
And when That 70's Show launched in 1998, it was a throwback celebration of all things seventies.
[clip: That 70s Show theme]
Plus, a yodel is just instantly recognizable. It cuts through the background noise of regular ads... just like it once cut through the natural sounds of a Swiss mountainside.
So it wasn’t too shocking when Yahoo decided that yodelling would be a great fit for their quirky brand. And in 1996, the production company who had been booking Wylie's commercials gave him a call.
[phone filter]
Wylie: “Hey, we have a little internet company. I don't know if you know who they are, but they're Yahoo."
Wylie: And I said, "Oh yeah, I know who Yahoo is."
Wylie: They said “The company thought it would be cool if you could yodel the Yahoo name." And I said, "Yeah, I think I can do that."
By this time, Wylie had moved up to his wife's farm in Washington state. So he hopped on a plane back to Los Angeles.
Wylie: I flew down to LA…
…went into the recording studio...
Wylie: …within five or 10 minutes, whipped out a bunch of yodels for Yahoo.
Wylie recorded about twenty takes, with a few melodic variations.
Wylie: The first version was Yahoooo!
Wylie: ... just three simple notes.
Wylie: The second version’s Yahoooo!
Wylie: It's kind of four notes.
[music in Heyday Highway - Drunken Lullaby]
At the time, Wylie had no idea what an impact those four notes would have on his life... especially because this yodel wasn't intended for wide usage.
Wylie: It was for a regional commercial. They were just going public. They were doing regional commercials in the Los Angeles area, and that's what they needed me to yodel for.
Wylie: Usually these commercials run six weeks or eight weeks. And it's a different form of payment when you do a regional commercial versus a national commercial.
If this had been a national ad campaign, Wylie would have earned residual payments every time one of these commercials aired. But since it was supposedly just a single local ad, he accepted a one-time payment of about six hundred dollars.
[music out]
So Wylie's commercial played in the LA area for a couple months, and that was it. A few years went by, and Wylie mostly forgot about his Yahoo yodel. He kept playing with his band, and even appeared on the Cartoon Network talk show, Space Ghost Coast to Coast.
[clip: Space Ghost Coast to Coast]
[Yahoo Super Bowl commercial sneaks in]
Wylie: And then in 1999, I was watching the Super Bowl...
During the ad break, a Yahoo commercial came on. The ad showed a dorky dude with a bad comb over who gets on Yahoo and types in hair.
In the next shot, we see him proudly walking down the street with an enormous Afro. Then, it played Yahoo's tagline.
[commercial up, then under]
Wylie: And at the end of the advertisement was my yodel.
[commercial up, then out]
Wylie: And Yahoo, by that time, had grown huge.
In the three years since Wylie recorded that yodel, Yahoo's market cap had jumped from a billion dollars to a hundred and fifteen billion. And apparently, Wylie's yodel was part of that explosion.
[music in: Brett Gregory - Friends and Family]
Wylie: I said, "That is so cool." But at the same time, "Wait a minute, nobody called me. Nobody checked in with me to use it, and to get the royalties." Because for a national commercial on the Super Bowl, the royalties are, you know, a good thing.
And it turned out, it wasn't just a Super Bowl ad. Unbeknownst to him, Wylie's yodel had become Yahoo's signature sonic brand, appearing in tons of commercials, and even the site itself.
Wylie: They also used it like when you got an email you would hear the Yahoo Yodel. It was all over the place. And so I started writing letters to Yahoo saying, "Hey, I'm the yodeler that yodeled your name, and you're using it as kind of an audio icon now at the end of all your commercials. Like, we need to talk." And they ignored me and ignored me. And finally, through my manager at the time, we hired a copyright attorney.
And so, the Yahoo yodeler sued Yahoo.
Wylie: And that's when we got their attention.
That's coming up, after the break.
[music out]
MIDROLL
[music in: Brett Gregory - Friends and Family]
By the late 90s, Yahoo was well on its way to becoming the most-visited website on the planet, with a television ad budget to match. These iconic commercials showed people using Yahoo to find something on the internet that changes their life... and they ended like this.
[music out into Yahoo yodel]
But the voice behind that yodel never signed on to this global ad campaign, and hadn't been paid for it.
[music in: Roy Williams - Coconut Cowboy]
At first, Wylie tried his best to get in touch with Yahoo.
Wylie: I wrote them for at least a year, wrote several letters, tried different angles of contacting people with the company. And at the time, they were just too big to look back and say, "Ah, we made a mistake. Let's rectify this mistake."
At one point, Wylie actually ran into one of Yahoo's top lawyers at a seminar about internet music.
Wylie: I was on a panel and he was on a panel. And I said, "Hey, we need to talk." And I think he gave me a card, and then I wrote him a letter, and he never responded.
This radio silence was especially frustrating, because at the time…
Wylie: My initial offerings were, I didn't want much. I said, "You know, maybe you can help us promote my band, promote my music." Yahoo was in a position to do that easily. And they just, there was no responses whatsoever.
Wylie: And here I was, the small guy, the yodeler that kind of was a big part of their marketing that they had just totally forgotten about and totally ignored. And so I started getting angry.
At that point, it was time to get a lawyer involved.
Wylie: We had to file a lot a lawsuit through the Los Angeles Superior Court. And that's when we got their attention, when we started talking to their legal department saying, "Hey, there's something amiss here."
[music out]
Not only did the lawsuit get Yahoo's attention, it also got the media's attention.
Wylie: It was a crazy time, because we were getting so much attention through these national news outlets and whatnot that I thought, "Okay, this is a good thing that the story’s getting out there."
Most people who heard about this case were very sympathetic to Wylie's situation... But not everyone.
Wylie: I remember getting some very angry emails. People were mad at me 'cause I was suing Yahoo. I don't know if they were fans of Yahoo, or they just thought that there was too much litigation going on in the world, and I was part of the problem. Uh, I remember that, and that kind of took me aback. It was like, uh, "Am I doing the right thing? You know?"
But Wylie persisted, and the story kept picking up steam.
Wylie: Fox News in New York called me and said, "Hey, we realize you have a lawsuit now, and we want to talk to you about it." And I was gonna fly out to New York and be on Fox News.
But shortly before his trip, he got word that Yahoo had finally seen the light.
[music in: Roy Edwin Williams - Countrypolitan]
Wylie: That's when Yahoo decided to settle with me, to make up for all the uses of the yodel. I think it just had to go up the flagpole a little bit to the right people. And they came up with a fair settlement that I thought was fair.
So in the end, there was no dramatic courtroom showdown. Just a company who messed up, but ultimately did the right thing... and a yodeller who got what he was owed. And that led to even more collaboration between them.
Wylie: They said, "We want to use you for other promotions that come up later." And I said, "Yeah, that sounds like a great deal." So not only did they settle with me, but I've been working for Yahoo, gosh, you know, for a couple decades now. Every couple years, they gimme a call and say, “Hey, we have a new promotion, we'd like to hire you.”
[music fade under]
Here's Wylie being interviewed for an internet segment called Yahoo On the Road.
Interviewer: Where else have you done the Yahoo Yodel?
Wylie: You know, it seems like every venue that I go to and perform with my band, Wylie and the Wild West, we probably do a hundred shows a year, and I do it at least once a show. Let people know that that’s my only hit that I’ve ever written, is the Yahoo Yodel.
Wylie: People wanna hear it. And it energizes them, and makes them smile. It’s amazing, the power that the Yahoo Yodel still has.
The settlement also allowed Wylie to ease up on the relentless touring he'd been doing.
[music in: Roy Edwin Williams - High Country]
Wylie: I've always been a struggling musician that's had to tour. There was several years of my career where we were out a couple hundred days, 220, 240 days a year. And it was the grind of trying to be a musician and make a living.
Wylie: So when the Yahoo settlement happened, it was an amount that changed my life at the time. It allowed me to get off the road a little bit, to focus more on my family and to get back to the ranch life a little more. Enjoy things like roping horses and doing those events that I'd missed out on over the years.
And when Wylie did go back on the road, he found that his Yahoo Yodel connected him with people all over the world.
Wylie: That yodel was heard worldwide. And there's a generation of people, when they find out I am the Yahoo Yodeler, it's like I'm a rockstar. You know? It's like "I'm just the Yahoo Yodeling dude!" You know, I… it was really nothing.
Wylie: But we've been lucky enough, over the last 30 years, we’ve toured in China, Japan, South America, Australia, parts of Europe, Russia. We've done a Russia tour. So it's kind of interesting all the touchstones. Because of the Yahoo yodel, a lot of people had heard me before. And it really is kind of fun meeting people like that that get so excited about that. [music out]
Wylie got so well known that he even gave Conan O'Brien a yodelling lesson, and then performed a yodeling duet with him.
[clip: Conan O'Brien]
Amazingly enough, it’s likely that Wylie is the most widely heard yodeler in history.
[music in: Arch Tremors - Goodbye Memory Lane]
Wylie: I'm lucky and blessed to be able to have a yodel that was picked up by one of the biggest internet companies of its time, you know? A time when so many things were changing in the world with communications and media.
Wylie: It really did make a difference for Yahoo at the time. I mean, they ran with it. And it was just part of their culture, the quirkiness and the weirdness. That's what they wanted to be, and this yodel fit what they were doing so well.
These days, Wylie splits his time between life on the ranch and life on the road playing music. And in both places, there's always lots of opportunities for a good yodel.
Wylie: In fact, just last week I was at the elementary school, teaching my, uh, first grader and his class how to yodel. That's where I know that the power of the yodel still exists. And it just… kids light up and the teachers light up when we teach 'em how to yodel.
Wylie: And that's the thing about yodeling, a lot of people, it has that effect on 'em. They smile. So there's something about the yodel that hits the certain parts of our brain that give us a little bit of joy for a little bit of moment. And I think that's part of the secret of why the Yahoo Yodel was so well accepted and so loved.
[music transition to: Wylie and The Wild West - Yodeling Fool]
[music transition to music in: Roy Edwin Williams - Spring Pickin']
Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced by my sound agency, Defacto Sound. To hear more, follow Defacto Sound on Instagram, or visit defacto Sound dot com.
Other Voices: This episode was written and produced by Andrew Anderson and Casey Emmerling with help from Grace East. It was sound designed and mixed by Brandon Pratt and Colin DeVarney.
Thanks to our guest, Wylie Gustafson. To hear more, search for Wylie and the Wild West wherever you get your music. He also has a book called How to Yodel: Lessons to Tickle Your Tonsils and Funnybone, which includes an instructional CD.
Subscribe to my Youtube channel, Dallas Taylor dot mp3 for video exclusives, including my behind the scenes trips to the sets of Jeopardy and SNL, Disney Imagineering, Cirque du Soleil, and more. You can also find me on Linkedin, Instagram and TikTok under that same name, Dallas Taylor dot mp3.
Thanks for listening.
[music out]
