I’ve noticed in old concert footage —specifically Elvis in the’50s and John Denver in the early ’70s—that the audiences just clapped for the artists. There was none of the falsetto “ wooo” you hear everywhere in the last few decades.
Does anyone know when the woo-woo started? And did something in particular cause audiences to start doing this?
It doesn’t look like the Reddit community had much success answering this one. Can we do better?
I think we need an actual example if what the OP is looking for. When I read the title, with the word ‘whooping’, Arsenio Hall was my thought as well. But the quote in the OP says “wooo”, which makes me think of something like what you’d see on footage of old Beatles concerts.
In the early 1970s, I went to see a Blaxploitation martial arts film called “Black Belt Jones”. Actor/martial artist Jim Kelly played the title character. The audience had a high percentage of Black teenagers, and they were the first audience I ever heard doing that ‘whooping’.
That’s what I had in mind - the sort of high-pitched continuous “wooooooo!” sound you hear from rock concert and stadium crowds. (“Old Beatles concerts” would be a prime example, now that you mention it.)
Re: Arsenio Hall, wasn’t that more of a dog-like “woot woot” sound? Though it could well be part of the same social shift away from sedate applause…
In that case, without doing any research whatsoever, I think The Beatles concerts would be a good starting point, but I’d probably look into what their concerts back home looked (sounded) like as well as other, earlier British Invasion bands (are there pre-Beatles British Invasion bands?).
It was ‘woof’, they were supposed to sound like dogs. For the purposes of this thread, it would be entirely unrelated.
Just a thought. Early 20th Century movie-goers were introduced to the Hollywood Indian war cry. And there was nothing more tribal by mid-century than the splintering genres of popular music.
Okay, that may not be true. But he used to do it all the time at concerts, and it took me decades to get him to quit it, because I’m of Chefguy’s persuasion when it comes to audiences drowning out the performers.
I would be looking towards more common.folk oriented entertainment than formal concerts. The phrase “hooten and a-hollerin’” comes to mind. So the carry over from that to more formal audiences and concerts isn’t a big jump.
It is pretty widespread. I went to a couple of concerts in the last week - solo piano doing Schubert nocturnes. It was very good. There was quite a bit of whooping from the audience at the end. YMMV.
Liszt and Paganini - that I could well imagine. Classical concerts were not the staid affairs they generally are now. People would sing along at popular operas, and demand immediate encores if they liked something. This was contemporary music, and these guys were in some ways the equivalent of Hendrix. Of course the poor folk didn’t get to hear so much of this.
Thinking about it, the question could be - when did audiences stop whooping, and when did they start again? Performance practice became much more formalised in concerts from say the early 1800’s. The earlier rise of the bourgeoisie meant that concerts had moved out of just being an aristocratically supported province, and people could attend just by paying. The notion of musical recitals as a serious occasion for polite society is not that old.
I recently watched Tiger Woods - The Great Comeback Story which is fascinating - it is mostly from fan footage. At some point Tiger Woods says, “This is where the modern game has changed and evolved, is that people don’t clap any more, because they can’t. Because they have a phone in their hand. They can’t actually clap because they are moving their phone. So they yell.”
Possibly May, 1913, at the first performance of Stravinski’s Rite of Spring in Paris. It was referred to as a “near-riot”, and some songs were drowned out by the outcry of parts of the audience.