Twang Chic: Sam Buckhannon Explores the Latest Fashion

If it’s true that Johnny Weismuller stole his Tarzan yell from the Alpine yodel, did Hank Williams in the back seat of his Cadillac dream the ululation of Bedouin women welcoming the horsemen back from war? When I was a boy only a fool would fake a country sound, and my father made his voice over to ring as simple as Jack Parr’s Midwest porkless, yamless, no-cornbread-or-cracklin’ patter. He didn’t want to be from Butts County, Georgia, and hated farm chores and coveralls. Football got him out. The FBI gave him a way to travel under cover, but I have heard him, years later, after choir practice and the church social, sit back with a Pall Mall and follow Eight-Finger Fleming’s banjo frail. He’d hold that smoke deep, his ash glowing till his throat was bathed in tar, and then he’d cut loose and scroll it out, a yodel to make Roy Rogers blush. It was no hymn, I’ll tell you. We had a brick split-level in the suburbs, and the radio station of choice adored Perry Como’s croon. My mother adopted words like boocoo and oodles to mask her peach-orchard drawl. An uncle might tell a farmer’s daughter joke, the rake fleeing the cocked shotgun stopping on a hill to yodel, “Andyouroldladytoo,” but nobody could say ain’t or you’uns or I’ll get to it directly