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.” MGM, New York.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. Bob’s Printers and Convenience Store, Topeka. (1994) Color me surprised: people eaters around the world. The purple people eater also likes short shorts, but it remains uncertain whether it is referring to its preferred clothing or – more worryingly – its choice in victims. The vaunted horn (still collected to this day for traditional Chinese medicine – the unfortunate Five-Eyed Nineteen-Horned Plodding Orange People Eater was driven to extinction in this way) is actually hollow, and serves as an amplifier for its mellow trumpeting vocalizations. Furthermore, it is not improbable that a diet of high-pigment purple people would render the purple people eater purple itself after all, flamingos dye themselves pink with shrimp, and the Four-Eyed Three-Horned Crawling Cobalt People Eater is a rich blue color owing to its primary diet of smurfs.Įither way, it is clearly some kind of trickster spirit, as, despite its proclivities for people-eating, it is capable of intelligent speech and desires to play in a rock and roll band. Unless Wooley himself is a purple person, it can be safely assumed that the purple people eater’s primary provender includes people and purple people alike. Wooley refers to the purple eater as feeding on purple people, but it also states that it would not eat Wooley due to his “toughness”. Equally unclear is whether or not it is a threat to humans. It is evident that it is one-eyed, one-horned, and flying (presumably to distinguish it from the dreaded Three-Eyed Two-Horned Swimming Turquoise People Eater), and it may also be pigeon-toed and under-growed, but it is unclear whether the “purple” refers to its coloration or its diet. Unfortunately descriptions of the purple people eater are vague. The primary source for it comes from Wooley, who describes its activities from a purported first-hand encounter. The One-Eyed, One-Horned, Flying Purple People Eater is a creature from North American folklore. Variations: Flying Purple People Eater, Purple People Eater
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