![]() ![]() talent scout while appearing in a play and made his movie debut in the 1950 film “Rocky Mountain,” starring Errol Flynn. He later hosted a Fort Worth-based country music radio show, “Sheb Wooley and the Calumet Indians,” before moving to Hollywood. Wooley, who was ineligible for the draft for medical reasons during World War II, moved to Nashville after the war and signed his first recording contract, with Bullet Records. ![]() Wooley even managed to land his group a weekly local radio show in Elk City, Okla. He also began playing the guitar and by 15 had formed his own band, “The Plainview Melody Boys,” in which he played guitar and sang. Wooley on his parents’ farm near Erick, Okla., on April 10, 1921, he learned to ride horses as a child and rode in rodeos as a teenager. gave Wooley its Comedian of the Year Award.Ī year later, he became an original cast member of “Hee Haw,” the long-running country music comedy variety series, for which he wrote the theme song.īorn Shelby F. Among them: “Talk Back Blubbering Lips,” “Sunday Morning Fallin’ Down,” “Harper Valley PTA ,” “The Happiest Squirrel in the Whole USA” and “Fifteen Beers Ago.” It was the first in a string of popular song parodies and other humorous songs Wooley wrote and recorded as his drunken alter ego, Ben Colder. Rex Allen’s hit 1962 recording of “Don’t Go Near the Indians” - a song Wooley had been pitched first but had declined to record - inspired him to write and record a parody: “Don’t Go Near the Eskimos,” which he recorded under the suitably icy name of Ben Colder and sang in a comically inebriated voice. “The Purple People Eater,” Dotson said, was “just one of those once-in-a-lifetime things.” “When he returned from lunch, everybody on the floors were gathered listening to it and he said, ‘Hey, maybe this is something.’ ” When Wooley turned over a tape of the song to Dean Kaye, his producer at MGM Records, Kaye “played it to the kids in the office,” Dotson said. And at the end of a recording session he had 30 minutes left, so he went on and recorded it.” “They did not like it,” Linda Dotson, Wooley’s wife and longtime manager, said Wednesday. Wooley’s label, MGM Records, did not want him to record the wacky song when he first sang it with his own guitar accompaniment. I wrote the song in a matter of minutes - just dashed it off as a sort of afterthought.” He was blowin' it out, really knockin' them dead.Wooley got the idea for “The Purple People Eater,” he once recalled, “when a songwriter friend of mine told me his son had come home from school with a joke about a people eater from space. A wap bap a doo bap, a wap bam boom! chorus (4 bars instrumental) And then he went on his way And what do you know? I saw him next day on a TV show. It was a crazy ditty with a swingin' tune. I wanna be a singer in a rock and roll band!" chorus (4 bars instrumental) Well, he swung from the tree And he lit on the ground And he started to rock, a really rockin' around. "I wouldn't eat you, 'cos you're so tough! chorus (4 bars instrumental) I said, "Mr Purple People Eater "What's your line?" "Eating Purple People, and it sure is fine! But that's not the reason that I came in to land. Sure looks strange to me! (4 bars instrumental) Well he came down to Earth and he lit in a tree I said "Mr Purple People Eater.don't eat me! I heard him say, in a voice so gruff. One eyed, one horned Flying Purple People Eater. I commenced to shakin' and I said "Woo-ee!" It looks like a Purple People Eater to me! It was a one eyed, one horned Flying Purple People Eater. (4 bars intro: 4/4 time) Well I saw the thing a-comin' out of the sky He had one long horn and one big eye. Just Can't Wait to be King Coronation 23. ![]()
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