There were a bunch of nonsense-syllable songs associated with the old wild west, at least when I was a kid and people tended to think kids would want to listen to western-themed music.
I had a vinyl album with “sleepytime songs” on one side and “wide-awake songs” on the other. This was an age when I had only recent graduated from plastic rattles. On the “wide-awake” side there was
this song featuring the memorable lyrics “sing song kitchee catchee ki me oh” and
this one that has the insightful refrain “diddly eye dee die deedle, diddly eye dee die day”.
I don’t know if the trend actually literally dates back to when the American west was an unfenced and un-highwayed stretch through which folks drove herds of cows, but it’s possible — some music folks think nonsense syllables started when some singer couldn’t remember the lyrics and just threw nonsense syllables in, but then of course other folks learned the songs from them.
Alternatively, if I may quote from Eddy Arnold a second time, there’s the notion that cowboys were out by themselves in a big open area and it was fun to sing high-pitched vocalisms that might echo —
Singing to yourself was something people did before radio and iPad.
But also, I’ve read that cowboys sung to their cattle at night, so that they didn’t startle when they heard the night watchman riding around. So I’m ready to believe that startling cows by yipping at them was also possible. Clearly there is some way of startling herds, and FAIK steers may not only be ‘sight’ prey animals.
The link between real cowboys and yodeling is tenuous, at best. Its only association is that the style was incorporated into Country music by Jimmie Rodgers in the 1920s. He was influenced by a mish mash of minstrel, Blues, and Alpine traditions. The first “cowboys” to yodel were the singing cowboys of the silver screen influenced by Rodgers.
As you suggest, many of those nonsense words are more of a music thing than a cowboy thing.
I’ve fallen victim to regretable grocery impluse buys at Menards. Dodgy off-brand seltzer, Paraguayan export beef, bizarre mashups like Skittle ramen and Hormel nondairy creamer. Well, not those last two but weird stuff.
It appears that we have many examples from 20th century pop culture but nothing from 19th century cowboy culture…my question may be doomed to go unanswered. Oh well.
The first recorded use of the word “Yippee” only goes back to about 1900, so it’s highly unlikely the phrase dates back to 19th Century cowboys. In fact, almost nothing 20th Century popular culture associated with cowboys is based on 19th Century cowboys. Westerns are up there with Science Fiction when it comes to reflecting actual reality.
At the turn of the century, cows and horses were still common, so stuff about cows and horses had to have some kind of minimum validity. Stuff like “gee” “haw”, and “yip yip yip”
Ki-Yay is just the lyric to rhyme with ‘all the way’.
Hmmm now that you mention it I don’t really remember “yippee ki yay” used by cowboys rounding up cattle in the Westerns I watched when I was a kid. Lots of haaaah and hooooo and yeehaa and whoop and yiii and yip but no yippee ki yay except when someone would get to actual singing.
(Note: original post allowed me to insert YT link. Then when correcting a typo it kept giving me the “can’t embed” error so I had to switch to a text-to-link.)
It seems odd that this would be something that 20th century songwriters invented out of whole cloth…but that may be the case.
It just occurred to me to check with our new AI overlords. Here’s what ChatGPT says about the question:
[quote=Skynet] The phrase “Yippee ki yay” is not something that historical cowboys were documented as actually saying in the Old West. It became widely popular thanks to Hollywood, especially after Bruce Willis’s character John McClane said it in the 1988 movie Die Hard (“Yippee-ki-yay, motherf***er”).
However, similar-sounding expressions do have roots in cowboy and Western folklore:
Cowboys often used “yippee,” “yahoo,” and similar exclamations when herding cattle or expressing excitement. These were “cowboy hollers”—vocalizations used on the range, partly to keep cattle moving or just to break the silence.
The phrase “yippee yi yo” or “yippee yi yay” appeared in old cowboy songs and yodels. For example, songs like “I’m an Old Cowhand (From the Rio Grande)” (1936) and “Home on the Range” included these types of playful vocalizations.
So while “yippee ki yay” in that exact form was likely not something 19th-century cowboys said, it’s a stylized, Hollywood-friendly evolution of authentic cowboy slang and musical expressions.
In short: not literally accurate, but inspired by real cowboy traditions.[\quote]
