Slim Whitman

Love Song of the Waterfall! Keep It a Secret! Indian Love Call! Rose Marie! That’s right, all of Slim Whitman’s greatest hits in one fantastic package! Bigger than the Beatles, Slim’s songs touch the hearts of everybody. Who could forget his version of Tumbling Tumbleweeds? Or I’m Casting My Lasso Towards the Sky? Don’t wait! This offer is not available in any stores. Call today!

I knew I was in some kind of alternate universe. Slim who? Bigger than the Beatles? Huh?

My mom and I had just moved from Seattle to Interlochen, where she had landed a job as the ballet instructor, a position she was to hold for the next dozen years. The trip itself was long and arduous, undertaken in a gasping Volkswagen hatchback that broke down completely a couple of times during our journey – including once in the middle of Yellowstone National Park. But we had finally made it to the picturesque campus nestled in the quiet woods of northern Michigan and moved our modest belongings into the left half of a rustic duplex, part of the on-campus housing supplied by the school. The culture shock was immediate and immense. Interlochen itself was a pretty cultured place, being a boarding school for high-school artists with an intense and rigorous college-preparatory academic program. So there was lots of music and art and theatre and whatnot to feed on, but it was located in about the reddest neck of the woods I had ever seen. Snowmobiles, cars on blocks in front yards, and deer-hunting were the major cultural pursuits of our neighbors and it was quite a disorienting experience coming from Seattle.

My mom immediately became fast friends with the new modern dance teacher, Su, who had also just arrived. She was from sunny California and was even more disoriented by the change in climate – both cultural and physical. Being strangers in a strange land, they clung to each other. One night, they drove around a bit, checking out the area, and stopped at a small food mart down the “highway” a piece (it was paved and had a number on, but didn’t resemble any highway I ever saw before). They went in to buy some snacks and asked the proprietor what there was to do for fun around there. After considering their question for a moment, he drawled, “well, you can have some frozen Snickers Bars. They’re dad-gum good!” Su and my mom could barely make it out of the store, they were giggling so hard. Later, they were stopped in the middle of the highway by a herd of cows that were leisurely crossing from one side of the road to the other, and they sat in the car, surrounded by snotty bovines, and screamed with laughter.

Later, the isolation and narrow attitudes of the locals would prove to be not nearly so entertaining, but at the beginning, it was a fascinating ethnographic study for two such culturally sophisticated young women.

For my part, I learned what I could by watching television and going to school. School was a drag, largely because I had one of the most criminally bad teachers of my entire career. I actually had the two of the worst teachers of my life for first and second grade, so it’s a wonder I ended up enjoying school as much as I did. My first grade teacher, Miss Rosenblatt, was explaining the rules of the classroom on our first day of school at the highly-regarded private school in Seattle that took me over an hour to get to by bus every morning (I was the first stop on the route and the last one dropped off at night). While she paced the front of the room, explaining the rules, she asked one of the boys sitting at a desk in the front row to grab onto the far edge of his desk, the one closest to her. Suddenly, she whipped around and swatted his knuckles – hard – with the long ruler she had been carrying, making him scream with surprise and pain. As he clasped his hands to his chest, wailing with tears pouring down his face, she turned towards us and remarked gravely that that’s what would happen if any of us broke any of the rules. And that was my within the first hour of my first day of school ever.

My new second grade teacher, Mrs. Richter (Mrs. Stricter), wasn’t much better. Because of our unreliable car, and the extra time it took to fix it on our cross-country trek, I had missed the first couple of days of school. Because I missed the first couple of days, I didn’t get the workbook that everybody else had. Because I didn’t get the workbook, I wasn’t allowed out for recess. If there’s logic in there, I still fail to see it, but she regularly punished people for things that weren’t their fault. Her method was to haul the offender up in front of the class for “court”, in which she would call out for suggestions as to what punishment the guilty party should endure. It was the kangarooiest court I’ve ever heard of, deeply perverting the idea of justice. For starters, you were automatically guilty, and it was only the punishment that was up for debate. Usually these consisted of having to stay in for recess or writing your infraction out hundreds of times or having to sit surrounded by members of the opposite sex for a week, or something else equally degrading. Once a few punishements had been written up on the board, she’d take a vote among the class, and the winning punishment was the one given (it was a democracy, after all). I myself, being a model student, only had to endure court once, and ended up having to write 100 times, “I will not get a bloody nose in class”.

Anyway, this first week of school gave Oma, my grandmother, one of her favorite stories about me. She was visiting to help us with the transition, and, after the first day of school, she asked how it was. I told her about the workbook problem and how I was already behind, but I was doing my best to catch up. The assignment was to make a list of words and pictures, one for each letter of the alphabet. As an example, Mrs. Richter wrote “airplane” on the board, and then forbade us from using that. And, of course, I didn’t have the fucking workbook so I couldn’t look up any other words, and had to try to extract them from my brain. I knew I could draw an apple, but I didn’t know if it had one p or two in it, and I had already figured out that there was no room for error in this class so, after considering it for a long time, I finally settled on “aid”, and drew a picture of somebody putting a bandage on another person’s knee. Once that was done, I had little trouble. Ball, cat, dog, esophagus and so on down the list. I got as far as P that day. Oma was proud of my resourcefulness and then stopped, asking, “what did you write for O?”

I showed her the picture of a little boy knocking over a glass of milk and shouting, “oh, no!” She thought that was so wonderful that it has now become one of her two or three primal stories about me, destined to be repeated each and every time I saw her for the next thirty years. And counting.

Anyway, school was quite educational in many ways, but I picked up more about the local culture from watching television. Two of the more popular televised sporting events of the time were demolition derbies and roller derby matches, both mind-bendingly surreal to an impressionable seven-year-old. Welcome to White Trash World! Enjoy your stay! In addition to these eye-opening “sports” spectacles, there were the local ads and TV “personalities” that really set the bar for bad local television, one I haven’t seen even approached as I moved around the country. The king of bad ads has to have been Van the Lumber Man, who’s hysterically awful acting and absurdly scripted spots rarely failed to send us into hysterics. But he had some stiff competition from the likes of Mickey Fivenson, owner of a restaurant supply store (who advertised on television because…?) and local mogul Don Melvoin whose lack of professionalism and cheesy faux chumminess put even LA anchors to shame – which is no mean feat. The local news also featured a weather stooge whose claim to fame was the nightly forecast written in initials across the map, which he would then try to pronounce and then decipher. So, he’d turn to the board and say, “tomorrow’s forecast is Pcitmworttatisiteattd, which means partly cloudy in the morning with occasional rain throughout the afternoon turning into snow in the evening as the temperature drops.” I don’t know which was more painful, watching him try to pronounce the giant random string of letters (he’d usually try two or three times – “Pcimtwo..no, no, Pcitmworatt, no, wait…”) or watching him try to remember what the initials stood for (“precipitation covering inland, um, partly cloudy is the, no, wait, partly cloudy in the morning with out, er,). I often wondered whether that was his idea or whether the station manager had a sadistic sense of humor and just liked to humiliate him. Either way, it was so bad that it became the first must-see TV.

And then there were the Slim Whitman ads. I had never heard of this guy, but, since he was bigger than the Beatles, I must’ve been the only one. I always wondered exactly what they meant by that. What statistical oddity made him bigger than the Beatles? Bigger in terms of television sales? Bigger in Armpit, Arkansas? Taller? Whitman’s outrageous yodeling, highlighted in these commercials, never failed to make my mom positively weep with laughter, and have to crawl, gasping, to the bathroom. It was a similar reaction she would have while watching Lawrence Welk, when the bubbles would start flying and some shriveled eighty-year-young trombone player was the featured soloist while the Toothsome Twins from Minnesota hummed behind him in exuberant accompaniment. Wunnerful, wunnerful.

Slim, who begrudgingly took the name that his record company insisted upon, (instead of his given one, Otis Dewey) was discovered by none other than Colonel Tom Parker, who was managing Eddie Arnold at the time and had yet to stumble across Elvis Presley and open that whole can of hip-swiveling worms. Although he did have modest success in America, his star really shone in Europe, where his squeaky clean image and emphatically overdone yodeling style won him legions of fans (from, where, Switzerland?). Just goes to show what a perverse image of America makes it overseas (not that we’re not guilty of the same thing here with our pictures of sweaty, red-faced fat men saying “I say, old chap” and throwing disparaging remarks across the Channel to those smelly, black-clad, Gitane-smoking, cheese-eating surrender monkeys). To my mom and me, Slim was the ultimate in hokum.

So when, a couple of years ago, I ran across a used best-of for a couple of bucks, how could I possibly resist? Although his enthusiastically acrobatic yodeling is worth a chuckle or two, the arrangements are so saccharine-sweet that they make your teeth hurt after a few minutes. But one blast of sugar between denser, more fibrous, protein-packed courses seems reasonable, so here it is. Although most of his songs are completely interchangeable, I chose this one because I really like the song. I first heard it on the soundtrack to Pennies From Heaven, Dennis Potter’s wonderful postmodern Depression-era musical. Although the original (or, at least, the version I first heard), is highly superior to Slim’s sugar-drenched interpretation, it’s still a good song and Slim’s operatic vocals are worth hearing. Once.