and two grandchildren.Ī public service will be at noon Monday at First Baptist Church of Hendersonville.ĭonations may be made in Wooley’s memory to the Leukemia Society, c/o Tennessee Oncology Associates, Skyline Medical Center, Nashville, Tenn. In addition to his wife, Wooley is survived by his two daughters, Christie Wooley of Nashville and Shauna Dotson of London a brother, Bill Wooley of Ruidosa, N.M. “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. 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 went on a six-day cattle drive in Montana when he was in his late 60's.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. He signed with MGM Records before making his way into movies.Ī genuine cowboy, Mr. While still in high school, he formed a band and later had a network radio show for three years. As a teenager, he did some rodeo riding that helped him find jobs later in movie westerns. Wooley in Erick, Okla., he spent his early years on his father's farm. Sheb Wooley uses the same sped-up tape effect for the voice of the Purple People Eater that David Seville also uses for the title character in his 'Witch Doctor' that same year (and that Seville later used for The Chipmunks). He was voted comedian of the year by the Country Music Association in 1968 and wrote the theme song of the long-running TV show ''Hee Haw.''īorn Shelby F. 'The Purple People Eater' is the novelty classic and a 1 hit in its day. He recorded a string of hit records from 1958 through the 1960's, most of them country humor songs, including ''Don't Go Near the Eskimos.'' Some were recorded under the name Ben Colder. Other TV credits included ''The Lone Ranger'' and ''Death Valley Days.'' In 1990, he made a guest appearance on ''Murder, She Wrote.'' Wooley played the scout Pete Nolan on ''Rawhide,'' the western series that helped start the career of Clint Eastwood. He was also in a movie ''Purple People Eater'' in 1988 starring Ned Beatty and Shelley Winters. ''Everyone was thinking about rockets and wondering if maybe we would find people up there.'' Wooley recalled that era in a 1982 interview with The Associated Press.
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