Sonny Terry
While on vacation recently I came across a brand new Sonny Terry CD for 4 Euros so grabbed it. I'm reasonably familiar with Sonny Terry having bought a Sonny and Brownie album more than 40 years ago and being a Joe Filisko fan. The whoopin' and hollerin' thing still eludes me though. Sonny sings quite a bit and has a really good blues voice. Was there something about the 30's and 40's that made the falsetto and its variations popular? Was it a fad? Was Sonny doing something through the harmonica that was a display of unusual technique?
Falsetto whooping in fast alternation with the harmonica was not unique to Sonny, although singing songs entirely in falsetto might have been. In later years he couldn't do the falsetto - for instance, compare his live Carnegie Hall 1938 or '39 version of Mountain Blues with later versions.
Whooping was a well-developed tradition in pre-war southern harmonica playing, often used to imitate dogs in fox chase pieces (it even turns up now and then in urban blues in a modified form, such as in Rice Miller's Chess record "The Hunt). It also shows up in Lost John pieces and other solo showpieces. The most widely heard practitioner would have been De Ford Bailey, who was heard throughout the south on the Grand Old Opry from about 1928 through 1941. Bailey toured widely with the Opry and with Bill Monroe and gave a young Sonny Terry a lesson, but Terry likely heard whooping from other sources as well.
Whooping with the harmonica was definitely a show of technique, and Terry became its most widely known practitioner as, unlike most of his role models and contemporaries, he transitioned to the New York folk scene and wider fame, where he became the only known player of his kind for most people. Latter-day players who have continued and extended the whooping tradition include Filisko,who tends to hew very close to the tradition as originally practiced (if here were a classical musician, he'd be playing Bach on 18th century instruments with the correct ornaments), and also more eclectic artists such as Peter Madcat Ruth, who once recorded a whooping piece titled "Sonny Terry Meets Jimi Hendrix."
Falsetto whooping in fast alternation with the harmonica was not unique to Sonny, although singing songs entirely in falsetto might have been. In later years he couldn't do the falsetto - for instance, compare his live Carnegie Hall 1938 or '39 version of Mountain Blues with later versions.
Whooping was a well-developed tradition in pre-war southern harmonica playing, often used to imitate dogs in fox chase pieces (dog yelp imitation even turns up now and then in urban blues in a modified form, such as in Rice Miller's Chess record "The Hunt). It also shows up in Lost John pieces and other solo showpieces. The most widely heard practitioner would have been De Ford Bailey, who was heard throughout the south on the Grand Ole Opry from about 1928 through 1941. Bailey toured widely with the Opry and with Bill Monroe and gave a young Sonny Terry a lesson, but Terry likely heard whooping from other sources as well.
Whooping with the harmonica was definitely a show of technique, and Terry became its most widely known practitioner as, unlike most of his role models and contemporaries, he transitioned to the New York folk scene and wider fame, where he became the only known player of his kind for most people. Latter-day players who have continued and extended the whooping tradition include Filisko,who tends to hew very close to the tradition as originally practiced (if here were a classical musician, he'd be playing Bach on 18th century instruments with the correct ornaments), and also more eclectic artists such as Peter Madcat Ruth, who once recorded a whooping piece titled "Sonny Terry Meets Jimi Hendrix."