Margo Smith – He Taught Me How to Yodel
1986
9.1K Likes
Best comments
1.“The earliest form of beatboxing.”
More comments
- 2.“I ran out of breath just listening.”
- 3.“I'm Swiss, and I can't do this. That's not fair.”
The story
Margo Smith taught elementary school in Ohio for about a decade before country music happened to her. She had two number one country hits in 1978 for Warner Bros., and then in the 1980s she found her real calling card: the yodel. She'd learned it as a kid on a farm outside Dayton, and by the mid-'80s she was billing herself as the Tennessee Yodeler and selling albums through cable TV infomercials.
This is her live in London in 1986, at the International Festival of Country Music at Wembley Arena, the long-running festival impresario Mervyn Conn put on there from 1969 to 1991. She shared that year's bill with Johnny Cash, George Jones, Bill Monroe and Marie Osmond. Her number is the gender-flipped version of an old Paul Roberts and Tom Emerson tune that Elton Britt recorded first as She Taught Me to Yodel and Frank Ifield later turned into a hit. It's a showpiece. Most of it is just her throat doing gymnastics.
She went on to sell yodeling lessons on tape and to mentor Taylor Ware of America's Got Talent. Smith died in Franklin, Tennessee, in January 2024, at 84. The kindergarten teacher left a lot of yodelers behind.
