The Most Famous Audio Track in Film History?

<v Speaker 1>Hello everybody, and welcome to these Surely you can't be
<v Speaker 1>serious podcasts. I am with my good friend d D.
<v Speaker 2>How you doing to I man, I'm doing great. Glad
<v Speaker 2>to be wrapping up season one. It has been a
<v Speaker 2>heck of a year.
<v Speaker 3>Oh my gosh.
<v Speaker 1>I'm so proud of what we've done and proud of
<v Speaker 1>what we've built and looking forward to season two.
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<v Speaker 1>That's right. We're not asking for a bunch of free
<v Speaker 1>money here. We're giving away good quality stuff, right. And
<v Speaker 1>just to clarify, this is not the last episode of
<v Speaker 1>season one.
<v Speaker 2>No, this is kind of a special edition for tonight,
<v Speaker 2>and we will be back with a matchup between Prince
<v Speaker 2>Sign of the Times and Joshua Tree by YouTube.
<v Speaker 1>Two masterpieces of nineteen eighty seven. We're gonna dive in,
<v Speaker 1>break them down, analyze it, give our opinions, and see
<v Speaker 1>where we come down on those two big time albums.
<v Speaker 2>So for today's episode, Jason, when you were growing up,
<v Speaker 2>did you ever listen to Paul Harvey on the radio?
<v Speaker 3>Oh yeah, for sure.
<v Speaker 2>I think he may possibly be my favorite voice announcer
<v Speaker 2>on the radio ever. He would do the news.
<v Speaker 3>And did you ever listen to the rest of the story,
<v Speaker 3>Oh yeah, for sure.
<v Speaker 1>Paul Harvey is from my hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma.
<v Speaker 2>I've got a little homage for today's episode. It's going
<v Speaker 2>to be a shorter episode.
<v Speaker 3>Let's hear it all right, here we go. It was
<v Speaker 3>nineteen fifty one. Shelby stood anxiously at the Warner Brothers
<v Speaker 3>recording studio, not sure about what was going to happen next.
<v Speaker 3>He had only recently moved to California in hopes of
<v Speaker 3>making it big, and so far he hadn't had a
<v Speaker 3>whole lot of success.
<v Speaker 2>He was far from home on his second marriage and
<v Speaker 2>had a young boy he had grown to a door
<v Speaker 2>depending on him, But little did he know the profound
<v Speaker 2>impact that this upcoming recording session would have. A one
<v Speaker 2>hundred years ago, the population of Eric, Oklahoma was nine
<v Speaker 2>hundred and seventy one, which is about thirty eight more
<v Speaker 2>than its population is today, and in April of nineteen
<v Speaker 2>twenty one, that population increased by one when Bill and
<v Speaker 2>Aura welcomed their third son in the world. Shelby would
<v Speaker 2>go on to learn horse riding and fiddle playing from
<v Speaker 2>Bill and so from a young age he would ride
<v Speaker 2>in rodeos, and at fifteen he formed a band called
<v Speaker 2>the plain View Melody Boys, who would periodically play on
<v Speaker 2>Station KASA in Elk City, Oklahoma. When Shelby was only nineteen,
<v Speaker 2>he married his first wife, Melva Miller, herself only seventeen
<v Speaker 2>at the time. Shelby became close with Melva's young cousin Roger,
<v Speaker 2>taught him how to play the guitar and bought him
<v Speaker 2>his first fiddle. Roger Miller would grow up to become
<v Speaker 2>a successful country musician himself. You probably know his song
<v Speaker 2>King of the Road, which was a number one Hot
<v Speaker 2>Country single and reached number four on the Hot one hundred.
<v Speaker 2>But This Seed that Shall Be Planted would not be
<v Speaker 2>the biggest mark he would make on the world of entertainment.
<v Speaker 2>Though he tried to enlist for World War Two, his
<v Speaker 2>rodeo injuries kept him out of the military, so instead
<v Speaker 2>he worked as a welder for oil drillers. Then in
<v Speaker 2>nineteen forty six, at the encouragement of Ernest tub he
<v Speaker 2>decided to leave the oil field, leave Oklahoma and pursue
<v Speaker 2>his love of music. He recorded his first single, moved
<v Speaker 2>to Fort Worth, Texas, and for three years he toured
<v Speaker 2>the South, but was ultimately unable to hit it big.
<v Speaker 2>So in nineteen fifty he brought his second wife, Edna
<v Speaker 2>and her young son Gary to Hollywood in hopes of
<v Speaker 2>establishing himself as an actor or a singer. But after
<v Speaker 2>a year he had only had a handful of parts,
<v Speaker 2>mostly uncredited, and that included the movie he was about
<v Speaker 2>to record for Uncredited For the part he played in
<v Speaker 2>the movie and uncredited for his part in the audio
<v Speaker 2>track that he was about to record. Yes, uncredited for
<v Speaker 2>the part that would become one of the most iconic
<v Speaker 2>recordings in history. Now, as it turned out, Shelby would
<v Speaker 2>ultimately be a success as a singer and as an actor.
<v Speaker 2>Just a year later, in nineteen fifty two, he would
<v Speaker 2>land his first big role in the movie High Noon
<v Speaker 2>as Ben Miller, one of the gang who would face
<v Speaker 2>off against Gary Cooper. A year after that, two songs
<v Speaker 2>that he had written would become hits for Teresa Brewer
<v Speaker 2>and Hank snow. Then, in nineteen fifty eight, he had
<v Speaker 2>two career making events. First, he was cast as Peter
<v Speaker 2>Nolan in the series Rawhide, a role he would play
<v Speaker 2>for the next eight years. Second was that he had
<v Speaker 2>recorded a song that would be his biggest chart topper,
<v Speaker 2>going gold in just three weeks and hitting number one
<v Speaker 2>on the Hot one hundred.
<v Speaker 3>The song it.
<v Speaker 2>Was a one eyed, one horn flying Purple People Leader Horn.
<v Speaker 3>It has sold well over one hundred million copies to date.
<v Speaker 3>But I am saying today that his uncredited contribution to
<v Speaker 3>one of his earliest movies surpasses even this in its impact.
<v Speaker 3>On the entertainment world. His acting career didn't stop with
<v Speaker 3>raw Hide either. He was in more than sixty movies
<v Speaker 3>and television roles, including The War Wagon with John Wayne,
<v Speaker 3>The Outlaw, Josie Wales with Clint Eastwood, Silverado with Kevin Kleine,
<v Speaker 3>Kevinner and Danny Glover, and Hoosiers, where he was literally
<v Speaker 3>sitting next to Gene Hackman on the bench helping coach
<v Speaker 3>the team. He was also one of the original cast
<v Speaker 3>members of Hehaw, which he wrote the theme for. He
<v Speaker 3>also had quite a bit of success as a recording
<v Speaker 3>artist as well. He had several more gold records. He
<v Speaker 3>won a CMA in nineteen sixty eight Songwriter of the
<v Speaker 3>Year in nineteen ninety two. He also won the Western
<v Speaker 3>Heritage Award for nine years in a row for his
<v Speaker 3>television work. But I maintain it was his nineteen fifty
<v Speaker 3>one recording that will be his most lasting legacy, and
<v Speaker 3>most people don't even know he was the man responsible.
<v Speaker 3>So what was Shelby Woolley who went by sheb about
<v Speaker 3>to record on that faithful day? Well, it was just
<v Speaker 3>one of a handful of actors they had called back
<v Speaker 3>that day to do some recording. They needed to finish
<v Speaker 3>up the movie Distant Drums. Sheb did six different takes
<v Speaker 3>and the last three ended up in the movie. Then
<v Speaker 3>all six takes went into the Warner Brothers vault, only
<v Speaker 3>to be used again in nineteen fifty two and in
<v Speaker 3>nineteen fifty three, three times in nineteen fifty four, including
<v Speaker 3>the Judy Garland version of A Star Is Born, twice
<v Speaker 3>in fifty five, and again and again over and over
<v Speaker 3>for the next twenty years. But nobody noticed. Nobody except
<v Speaker 3>a young film production grad student at USC named Ben.
<v Speaker 3>In his studies, Ben had noticed Sheb's work and was impressed,
<v Speaker 3>so impressed that he and his buddy Richard would record
<v Speaker 3>it from A Star Is Born just to put it
<v Speaker 3>in their nineteen seventy four student film, The Scarlet Blade.
<v Speaker 3>Ben would graduate the next year, and then two years
<v Speaker 3>after that he would get his first credited job as
<v Speaker 3>a sound designer. This job allowed him to do research
<v Speaker 3>in several sound libraries, including the one at Warner Brothers,
<v Speaker 3>where he was able to find Seb's original recordings, and
<v Speaker 3>it was this discovery that led to its proliferation in
<v Speaker 3>the nineteen eighties, nineties and on into the twenty first century.
<v Speaker 3>His friend Richard used it in his movies as well,
<v Speaker 3>including Poltergeist, Batman Returns, Planet of the Apes, and Madagascar.
<v Speaker 3>Other sound editors became aware of Seb's recordings and used
<v Speaker 3>it in their films as well. Disney films, Spielberg films,
<v Speaker 3>Joe Dante has used it in at least five of
<v Speaker 3>his films. Peter Jackson was so impressed that he deliberately
<v Speaker 3>cranked the volume when Sheb's voice was used in Lord
<v Speaker 3>of the Rings, and when Quentin Tarantino learned the significance
<v Speaker 3>of this recording while it was being put into Reservoir Dogs,
<v Speaker 3>he called a break and had his sound crew come
<v Speaker 3>and listen to its first appearance way back in Distant Drums.
<v Speaker 3>In fact, since ben discovered Seb's recordings back in nineteen
<v Speaker 3>seventy seven while finding sounds for a new movie called
<v Speaker 3>Star Wars, Sheb's voice has been used in over one
<v Speaker 3>hundred and thirty films and television episodes, and Ben Bert
<v Speaker 3>found it in a canister marked quote man getting bit
<v Speaker 3>by an alligator and he screams end quote because it
<v Speaker 3>wasn't Sheb's singing voice, but his screaming voice that he
<v Speaker 3>recorded on that faithful day back in nineteen fifty one,
<v Speaker 3>and though Sheb played Private Jessup in Distant Drums, it
<v Speaker 3>was a memorable moment in a film two years later
<v Speaker 3>called The Charge at Feather River, where Ben Burt first
<v Speaker 3>heard Sheb's scream as another young private is shot in
<v Speaker 3>the leg a young private named Willhelm, which is why,
<v Speaker 3>if you haven't guessed it already, he named it the
<v Speaker 3>Wilhelm Scream, and that is the story as best I
<v Speaker 3>can tell.
<v Speaker 1>Nice. That's awesome.
<v Speaker 3>That's awesome.
<v Speaker 1>I know it from Star Wars for sure, Return of
<v Speaker 1>the Jedi.
<v Speaker 3>For sure, Indiana Jones, Indiana.
<v Speaker 1>Raiders, a little lost star without a doubt.
<v Speaker 3>It's iconic.
<v Speaker 1>That's good man, you did some research on that.
<v Speaker 3>That's awesome.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it was just crazy when you find out that
<v Speaker 2>the guy responsible for the one eyed, one horn, flying
<v Speaker 2>Purple People Leader and the themed Hehaw is the guy
<v Speaker 2>who did the Wilhelm screen.
<v Speaker 1>That's incredible. It's incredible. I'm gonna have to go back
<v Speaker 1>and watch Whosis just to figure this guy out. So
<v Speaker 1>all right, everybody, thank you for joining us on this
<v Speaker 1>mini episode coming soon.
<v Speaker 3>De This is going to be amazing.
<v Speaker 1>We are going to break down and analyze Princess Sign
<v Speaker 1>of the Times album versus You Two's Joshua Tree. And
<v Speaker 1>then after that, around Christmas time, we're going to discuss
<v Speaker 1>and debate Leave the Weapon versus Diehard.
<v Speaker 3>Christmas movies, absolutely Christmas.
<v Speaker 1>Movies, just in time for the holidays, all.
<v Speaker 2>Right, everybody, so be sure and join us for that.
<v Speaker 2>We can't wait look forward to seeing you of them.
<v Speaker 1>Ah. We ought to do our uh impressions, oh man,