From the Back Roads

Have you ever read or heard a word that hits a memory soft spot? That happened to me recently when I read the word YODELING. It made me think when I last heard the word and conjured up memories of watching Roy Rogers and Dale Evans on tv Saturday mornings when I was a child. Roy and Dale yodeled a lot when they caught the bad guys and helped the innocent. After their show, I’d climb the Chinese Tallow tree in the back yard and try with all my might to yodel. Chickens in the coop behind the garage went crazy.

You don’t hear yodeling much anymore. I have a CD recording of LeAnn Rimes “accompanying” Eddie Arnold in the song Cattle Call, one of my Dad’s favorite songs in which old Eddie (and later young LeAnn) yodel to calm jittery cattle. When I listen to it I’m transported back to the 1950s. I’d sit in the hayloft and watch my Daddy and brothers strut around in cowboy boots and hats. One of my brothers had an authentic Roy Rogers cap pistol that I coveted in the worse way.

Anyone who knows me understands my level of curiosity for the silliest things. Yodeling is one of them. I just now looked up YODEL in my computer’s dictionary. It says only that it is “a form of singing or calling marked by rapid alteration between the normal voice and falsetto.” Wikipedia didn’t even have an entry for yodel. What’s the world coming to? Think what America’s youth are missing in this “advanced” day and age of FB and tweets.

I guess the point for me is that I remember yodeling, which makes me remember chickens squawking, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans’s life lessons every Saturday morning, my brothers and my Daddy. Most likely, in another twenty or thirty years our grandchildren will remember BLOGGING and wonder when they last heard the word.