Innehåller bibliografiska referenser och index.

1. Classifying yodeled effects in popular music -- 2. Yodel sign and yodel idea in nineteenth-century art music -- 3. Yodeling in nineteenth-century vocal music -- 4. Americanizing the yodel -- 5. Jimmie Rodgers and the Hillbilly yodel -- 6. Cowboys and yodeling -- 7. The vicissitudes of a musical sign How the Yodel Became a Joke.

Timothy E. Wise presents the first book to focus specifically on the musical content of yodeling in our culture. He shows that yodeling serves an aesthetic function in musical texts. A series of chronological chapters analyzes this musical tradition from its earliest appearances in Europe to its incorporation into a range of American genres and beyond. Wise posits the reasons for yodeling's changing status in our music. How and why was yodeling introduced into professional music making in the first place? What purposes has it served in musical texts? Why was it expunged from classical music? Why did it attach to some popular music genres and not others? Why does yodeling now appear principally at the margins of mainstream tastes? Maintaining high scholarly standards but keeping the general reader in mind, the author examines yodeling in relation to ongoing cultural debates about singing, music as art, social class, and gender. Chapters devote attention to yodeling in nineteenth-century classical music, the nineteenth-century Alpine-themed song in America, the Americanization of the yodel, Jimmie Rodgers, and cowboy yodeling, among other topics. --[Förlagets beskrivning]