Chart Topping Musician Received NO CREDIT for One of the Most Iconic Recordings in Movie History!

<v Speaker 1>Hello everybody, and welcome back for a very special Independence
<v Speaker 1>Day celebration. Shirly Podcast episode Jason, do you know the
<v Speaker 1>date that the Declaration of Independence was ratified?
<v Speaker 2>How about July fourth, seventeen seventy six.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, wrong answer. I'm sorry, that isn't incorrect. No, there
<v Speaker 1>was a big fight leading up to the declaration of independence.
<v Speaker 1>I mean we had thirteen colonies, some were for voting
<v Speaker 1>for independence, somewhere against it. There was a big fight.
<v Speaker 1>But it was on July second, today, the day of
<v Speaker 1>this podcast, July second, that it was actually some colonies
<v Speaker 1>to switch their position. South Carolina was like, nope, we're
<v Speaker 1>gonna vote for independence, and so on July second, seventeen
<v Speaker 1>seventy six, that was the day that independence was adopted
<v Speaker 1>by twelve affirmative votes and one abstention. They formally said
<v Speaker 1>we are going to sever our political ties with Great Britain.
<v Speaker 1>As a matter of fact, John Adams wrote to his
<v Speaker 1>wife the following day and predicted that July second would
<v Speaker 1>become a great American holiday. It is only because the
<v Speaker 1>people didn't know until it was formally adopted two days
<v Speaker 1>later on July fourth, that that became what we now
<v Speaker 1>celebrate as our Independence Day, but it was actually adopted
<v Speaker 1>two days before today today in celebrate July.
<v Speaker 2>Happy July second.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, happy July second. You got your fireworks ready to go?
<v Speaker 2>I'm ready to blow up some crap.
<v Speaker 1>As the as the Bridge call it the Rebellion Day.
<v Speaker 1>I don't so. I am here today not to talk
<v Speaker 1>to you about the independence of the United States, but
<v Speaker 1>to just bring you, guys a special episode. This is
<v Speaker 1>a special edition episode. We have a great Patreon family.
<v Speaker 1>If you guys are interested in becoming a part of
<v Speaker 1>our Patreon family, all you have to do is go
<v Speaker 1>to patreon dot com slash Shirley Podcast. For as little
<v Speaker 1>as five bucks a month, you get access to all
<v Speaker 1>of our special Patreon episodes where we cover one hit
<v Speaker 1>wonders and other kind of novelty songs. You even managed
<v Speaker 1>to sneak Mariah Carrey in there on me, which is
<v Speaker 1>none too happy about, but it's still a great episode.
<v Speaker 1>It is.
<v Speaker 3>And every every song has a story. Every song has
<v Speaker 3>a story that's right, and we like telling those stories.
<v Speaker 3>That's what I'm here to do today is tell a story.
<v Speaker 3>What we've started doing on some of these Patreon episodes
<v Speaker 3>is we you started this, You're like, Okay, d I've
<v Speaker 3>got a song that I'm going to tell you about
<v Speaker 3>and you have to try to guess what it is.
<v Speaker 3>And it's kind of the way we do our top fives,
<v Speaker 3>you know, we lead it in. And that's what I'm
<v Speaker 3>gonna do with today's episode. I'm going to talk to
<v Speaker 3>you about an American musician who is a chart topping
<v Speaker 3>musician and is responsible for one of the most iconic
<v Speaker 3>records in all of movie history, and he got no
<v Speaker 3>credit for it. As a matter of fact, I would
<v Speaker 3>venture to say that ninety nine percent of the people
<v Speaker 3>who are familiar with this recording are not familiar with
<v Speaker 3>who recorded it. And it is a great story. And
<v Speaker 3>it turns out it's a guy from Oklahoma right here
<v Speaker 3>where we are.
<v Speaker 1>All right, you bekaya? It was nineteen fifty one. Shelby
<v Speaker 1>stood anxiously at the Warner Brothers recording studio, not sure
<v Speaker 1>about what was going to happen next. He had only
<v Speaker 1>recently moved to California in hopes of making it big,
<v Speaker 1>and so far he hadn't had a whole lot of success.
<v Speaker 1>He was far from home on his second marriage and
<v Speaker 1>had a young boy. He had grown to a door
<v Speaker 1>depending on him. But little did he know the profound
<v Speaker 1>impact that this upcoming recording session would have. One hundred
<v Speaker 1>years ago, the population of Eric, Oklahoma was nine hundred
<v Speaker 1>and seventy one, which is about thirty eight more than
<v Speaker 1>its population is today, and in April of nineteen twenty one,
<v Speaker 1>that population increased by one when Bill and Aura welcomed
<v Speaker 1>their third son and the World. Shelby would go on
<v Speaker 1>to learn horse riding and fiddle playing from Bill and
<v Speaker 1>so from a young age he would ride in rodeos,
<v Speaker 1>and at fifteen he formed a band called the plain
<v Speaker 1>View Melody Boys, who would periodically play on Station KASA
<v Speaker 1>in Elk City, Oklahoma. When Shelby was only nineteen, he
<v Speaker 1>married his first wife, Melva Miller, herself only seventeen at
<v Speaker 1>the time. Shelby became close with Melva's young cousin, Roger,
<v Speaker 1>taught him how to play the guitar and bought his
<v Speaker 1>first fiddle. Roger Miller would grow up to become a
<v Speaker 1>successful country musician himself. You probably know his song King
<v Speaker 1>of the Road Pause, which was a number one Hot
<v Speaker 1>Country single and reached number four on the Hot one hundred.
<v Speaker 1>But this seed that shall be planted would not be
<v Speaker 1>the biggest mark he would make on the world of entertainment.
<v Speaker 1>Though he tried to enlist for World War Two, his
<v Speaker 1>rodeo injuries kept him out of the military, so instead
<v Speaker 1>he worked as a welder for oil drillers. Then in
<v Speaker 1>nineteen forty six, at the encouragement of Ernest tub he
<v Speaker 1>decided to leave the oil field, leave Oklahoma and pursue
<v Speaker 1>his love of music. He recorded his first single, moved
<v Speaker 1>to Fort Worth, Texas, and for three years he toured
<v Speaker 1>the South, but was ultimately unable to hit it big.
<v Speaker 1>So in nineteen fifty he brought his second wife, Edna
<v Speaker 1>and her young son Gary to Hollywood in hopes of
<v Speaker 1>establishing himself as an actor or a singer. But after
<v Speaker 1>a year he had only had a handful of parts,
<v Speaker 1>mostly uncredited, and that included the movie he was about
<v Speaker 1>to record for, uncredited for the part he played in
<v Speaker 1>the movie, and uncredited for his part in the audio
<v Speaker 1>track that he was about to record, Yes, uncredited for
<v Speaker 1>the part that would become one of the most iconic
<v Speaker 1>recordings in history. Now. As it turned out, Shelby would
<v Speaker 1>ultimately be a success as a singer and as an actor.
<v Speaker 1>Just a year later, in nineteen fifty two, he would
<v Speaker 1>land his first big role in the movie High Noon
<v Speaker 1>as Ben Miller, one of the gang who would face
<v Speaker 1>off against Gary Cooper. Year after that, two songs that
<v Speaker 1>he had written would become hits for Teresa Brewer and
<v Speaker 1>Hank Snow. Then, in nineteen fifty eight, he had two
<v Speaker 1>career making events. First, he was cast as Peter Nolan
<v Speaker 1>in the series Rawhide, a role he would play for
<v Speaker 1>the next eight years. Second was that he had recorded
<v Speaker 1>a song that would be his biggest chart topper, going
<v Speaker 1>gold in just three weeks and hitting number one on
<v Speaker 1>the Hot one hundred. The song it was a one eyed,
<v Speaker 1>one horn flying tirple people lead one Horn. It has
<v Speaker 1>sold well over one hundred million copies to date, but
<v Speaker 1>I am saying today that his uncredited contribution to one
<v Speaker 1>of his earliest movies surpasses even this in its impact
<v Speaker 1>on the entertainment world. His acting career didn't stop with
<v Speaker 1>Rawhide either. He was in more than sixty movies and
<v Speaker 1>television roles, including The War Wagon with John Wayne, The
<v Speaker 1>Outlaw Josie Wales with Clint Eastwood, Silverado with Kevin Klein,
<v Speaker 1>Kevin Costner and Danny Glover and Hoosiers, where he was
<v Speaker 1>literally sitting next to Gene Hackman on the bench helping
<v Speaker 1>coach the team. He was also one of the original
<v Speaker 1>cast members of Heehaw, which he wrote the theme for.
<v Speaker 1>He also had quite a bit of success as a
<v Speaker 1>recording artist as well. He had several more gold records.
<v Speaker 1>He won a CMA in nineteen sixty eight Songwriter of
<v Speaker 1>the Year in nineteen ninety two. He also won the
<v Speaker 1>Western Heritage Award for nine years in a row for
<v Speaker 1>his television work. But I maintain it was his nineteen
<v Speaker 1>fifty one recording that will be his most lasting legacy,
<v Speaker 1>and most people don't even know he was the main responsible.
<v Speaker 1>So what was Shelby Woolley who went by SHEB about
<v Speaker 1>to record on that faithful day? Well, he was just
<v Speaker 1>one of a handful of actors they had called back
<v Speaker 1>that day to do some recording they needed to finish
<v Speaker 1>up the movie Distant Drums. Sheb did six different takes
<v Speaker 1>and the last three ended up in the movie. Then
<v Speaker 1>all six takes went into the Warner Brothers vault, only
<v Speaker 1>to be used again in nineteen fifty two and in
<v Speaker 1>nineteen fifty three, three times in nineteen fifty four, including
<v Speaker 1>the Judy Garland version of A Star Is Born twice
<v Speaker 1>in fifty five, and again and again over and over
<v Speaker 1>for the next twenty years. But nobody noticed. Nobody except
<v Speaker 1>a young film production grad student at USC named Ben.
<v Speaker 1>In his studies, Ben had known noticed Seb's work and
<v Speaker 1>was impressed, so impressed that he and his buddy Richard
<v Speaker 1>would record it from A Star As Born just to
<v Speaker 1>put it in their nineteen seventy four student film, The
<v Speaker 1>Scarlet Blade. Ben would graduate the next year, and then
<v Speaker 1>two years after that he would get his first credited
<v Speaker 1>job as a sound designer. This job allowed him to
<v Speaker 1>do research in several sound libraries, including the one at
<v Speaker 1>Warner Brothers, where he was able to find Seb's original recordings,
<v Speaker 1>and it was this discovery that led to its proliferation
<v Speaker 1>in the nineteen eighties, nineties and on into the twenty
<v Speaker 1>first century. His friend Richard used it in his movies
<v Speaker 1>as well, including Poltergeist, Batman, Returns, Planet of the Apes,
<v Speaker 1>and Madagascar. Other sound editors became aware of Schev's recordings
<v Speaker 1>and used it in their films as well. Disney films
<v Speaker 1>Spielberg films. Joe Dante has used it in at least
<v Speaker 1>five of his films. Peter Jackson was so impressed that
<v Speaker 1>he deliberately cranked the volume when Sheb's voice was used
<v Speaker 1>in Lord of the Rings. And when Quentin Tarantino learned
<v Speaker 1>the significance of this recording while it was being put
<v Speaker 1>into Reservoir Dogs, he called a break and had his
<v Speaker 1>sound crew come and listen to its first appearance way
<v Speaker 1>back in Distant Drums. In fact, since Ben discovered Sheb's
<v Speaker 1>recordings back in nineteen seventy seven while finding sounds for
<v Speaker 1>a new movie called Star Wars, Sheb's voice has been
<v Speaker 1>used in over one hundred and thirty films and television episodes,
<v Speaker 1>and Ben Burt found it in a canister marked quote
<v Speaker 1>man getting bit by an alligator and he screams because
<v Speaker 1>it wasn't Shebb's singing voice, but his screaming voice that
<v Speaker 1>he recorded on that faithful day back in nineteen fifty one.
<v Speaker 1>And though Sheb played Private jessup in Distant Drums, it
<v Speaker 1>was a memorable moment in a film two years later
<v Speaker 1>called The Charge at Feather River, where Ben Bert first
<v Speaker 1>heard Sheb's scream as another young private is shot in
<v Speaker 1>the leg a young private named Willhelm, which is why,
<v Speaker 1>if you haven't guessed it already, he named it the
<v Speaker 1>Wilhelm Scream, and that is the story as best I
<v Speaker 1>can tell.
<v Speaker 2>Nice, that's awesome.
<v Speaker 1>That's awesome.
<v Speaker 2>I know it from Star Wars for sure, Return of
<v Speaker 2>the Jedi for sure, Indiana Jones, Indiana Raiders, a little
<v Speaker 2>lost star, without a doubt.
<v Speaker 1>It's iconic.
<v Speaker 2>That's good man, you did some research on that.
<v Speaker 1>That's awesome. Yeah, it was just crazy when you find
<v Speaker 1>out that the guy responsible for the one eyed, one horn,
<v Speaker 1>flying purple people eater and the themed Hehaw is the
<v Speaker 1>guy who did the Wilhelm screen.
<v Speaker 2>That's incredible. It's incredible. I'm gonna have to go back
<v Speaker 2>and watch Hoosias just to.
<v Speaker 1>Figure this guy out.
<v Speaker 2>So, okay, guys, that's gonna be it for our special episode.
<v Speaker 2>But we hope you'll have a great Fourth of July
<v Speaker 2>with your family, a safe and fun fourth of July
<v Speaker 2>celebrating independence. But join us back here next week. D
<v Speaker 2>We're gonna have the top five songs of nineteen seventy nine.
<v Speaker 1>Oh my gosh, we seventy eight was fantastic. I can't
<v Speaker 1>wait to see what seventy nine brings us.
<v Speaker 2>A lot of great pop songs, a lot of great
<v Speaker 2>rock from that era, got some country, got some disco.
<v Speaker 2>It's gonna be fun. Come on back for that. We'll
<v Speaker 2>see you back here next week. We ought to do
<v Speaker 2>our impressions, oh man,