I've noticed that people mostly tend to be dimly aware of musical genre and style inside the parks, and less aware of specific selections. In this way the parks simulate the sensation of watching films: when we see a Western scene on TV we usually hear Western-style music, and Frontierland follows suit. The mind smooths right over it. We're aware that appropriate music plays on Main Street, but most people would not be able to select song titles off a list.
But there's one exception to this, it's a background music loop that everyone notices: the yodeling music.
This may be because of sheer force of novelty. It's very rare to be in an environment in which yodeling is unavoidable, so it's the sort of thing that leaps out at you when you do hear it. Combine this with two attraction queues in which the wait was usually quite extensive - the Matterhorn Bobsleds and the Skyway - and you have a situation where people are going to remember that yodeling, whether they want to or not.
There are, depending on how you count them, three or four distinct Jack Wagner created loops in this category - I call them the "Swiss" loops, and they all share a common, though largely unexplored, ancestry. Hopefully in the future I'll be able to fully explore the subject, but in the meantime let's take an intimate look at the most famous of them: the queue loop for the Matterhorn Bobsleds from 1978.
How Many Swiss Records Can You Have?
This loop comes to us through an authoritative source, which is Wagner himself - it survives as a physical reel to reel magnetic tape. It's circulated in various versions and various states of completeness through the years, the best of which was recently available through Walt's Music. "Best" may be subjective here, as most of the copies of the loop itself - which is a scarce 18 minutes and consists of polka-style music with Jack's overlaid safety announcements - is severely deteriorated. As park testimonial it's invaluable but as a listening experience it's somewhat unpleasant.
For a long time these existed as one chunk of musical material, all apparently from a single, unknown source. The one lead which existed was that one of the tracks was known to have been recorded by Fred Burri, Disneyland's in-house yodeler, and available on his record "Folk Music and Yodeling".
Thanks to Michael Sweeney, RocketRodsXPR, Pixelated, and others at MouseBits.Com, a fuller picture of the Matterhorn queue loop may be assembled.
I think the foundation of this loop is probably the Fred Burri LP, which, if I had to put money on, was probably used as the Matterhorn music in the years before the 1978 rebuild and Jack's loop came in. Jack appears to have gone to some lengths to match and complement the feeling of his selections to the Fred Burri recordings. The Fred Burri record wasn't released by Disney, but under Star Records, but they seem to have ended up with the rights somehow anyway: a Fred Burri selection was released as part of the 2005 "Musical History of Disneyland" box set.
The other two records were already in Wagner's back catalog of music due to his use of them at the Magic Kingdom in the early 70s, and both were courtesy of Capitol Records. Jack used to work for Capitol and had an amiable agreement with certain people inside the company. The records are A Visit to Switzerland and Music of the German Alps.
Disneyland - Matterhorn Bobsleds
Queue Music - 1978 - Comp. Jack Wagner
01. Im Chuchichäschtli
Fred Burri and the Matterhorn Musicians
02. Alpaufzug Luzarner Chilby [edit]
Fred Burri and the Matterhorn Musicians
03. At the Source of the Rhine
Bundner Landlerquintett - A Visit to Switzerland
04. Naughty Boy Ländler
Landlerkapelle Oberland - A Visit to Switzerland
05. Obervazer-Schottisch
Bundner Landlerquintett - A Visit to Switzerland
06. Am Trachtefescht
Fred Burri and the Matterhorn Musicians
07. Schi Scha Schatzeli [edit]
Fred Burri and the Matterhorn Musicians
08. Der Klarinettenmuckel
Alfons Bauer - Music of the German Alps
09. Schneidig Voran
Alfons Bauer - Music of the German Alps
10. By the Bonfire
Landlerkapelle Barner Mutze - A Visit to Switzerland
Thanks to Michael Sweeney, Pixelated, and Theme Park Audio Archives, I was able to rebuild the 1978 loop in Stereo with much higher aural quality than had previously been available. All of the edits and spacing is closely modeled on Jack's edits as preserved on the Walts Music copy.
Note that this version is slightly longer than the existing source tape copies. I had similar problems in synching up other Wagner loops for reconstruction, but both of these other reconstructions were based on live recordings by Mike Lee. This leads me to suspect that the process of transferring from reel to reel to result in the looping audio cartridges used in park resulted in a slight speed up. Or, for all we know, Jack's turntable just ran slightly too fast!
What is noteworthy when you have the entire source LP playing is how judicious Wagner was in selecting his tracks. A great deal of these 60s "Swiss" LPs consists of "Nature-Yodels", which are spare and almost dissonant to the ear. He definitely knew what he wanted, and edited the Fred Burri tracks to match. Often Fred will sing a few verses (or more) - Wagner dropped it all and got right on with the Yodeling.
Fred Burri, by the way, seems to still be around, although retired. Perhaps if you live in the Seattle area you can hire him to play your next birthday party?
The Alfons Bauer LP is an odd case. Bauer seems to have been promoted to capitalize on the momentary popularity of the zither due to the 1949 film The Third Man, and there's surprisingly little of him on his record. A more apt byline would probably be "Alfons Bauer and his 50 Friends". Regardless, the whole record is up on Amazon, split up not by individual song but by side, which is suspicious to say the least. At least nobody can say it's a bad value!
"A Visit to Switzerland" LP is made up of tracks from various performing groups, as are many of the other "Swiss" LPs Wagner worked with. In Swiss folk music, the name of the group changes depending on how many people are in the group and what instruments are used so that, in this example, a landlerkapelle is different than a landlerquintett. One way to translate Landlerkapelle Barner Mutz would be as "The Berner Bear Band".
Very little information about these artists seems to exist online, but what does exist strongly implies that Capitol was licensing these tracks from local music producers for fairly cheap, as the music was already ten to fifteen years old and had depreciated in value. Some of these tracks, recorded in the 40s, repackaged in America in the 60s, and combined into theme park loops in the 1970s - they still play at Disneyland and Walt Disney World today.
That has to be the most bizarre path to a kind of immortality on record. Who would suspect, generations later, their yodeling would be heard by millions each year - in Fantasyland?
Ready for more? Visit the Passport to Dreams Theme Park Music Hub.
Or, hop a monorail to the past and spend a full "day" at the Walt Disney World of the 1970s by downloading Another Musical Souvenir of Walt Disney World.