“So I got into the other end of the cowboy business and played mostly heavies in my film career.”Īs a singer, Wooley continued performing on stage until 1999, when his illness finally forced him to quit. Wooley told the Los Angeles Times in 1960 that he came out to Hollywood to become a singing cowboy, “but when I got here in 1950 they didn’t want any singing cowboys, even if you had your own guitar.
#Song purple people eater movie
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.” 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. “Everyone was thinking about rockets and wondering if maybe we would find people up there. “The Space Age was upon us,” Wooley recalled in a 1982 Associated Press interview. “The Purple People Eater,” with lyrics that included “It was a one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple people eater,” spent six weeks at No. He had a decade of singing and writing country and pop songs behind him when he wrote and recorded the silly, Sputnik-era pop song that became his biggest hit.
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