THE
NONSENSE SONG WHICH SOLD 10 MILLION COPIES WORLDWIDE
Purple
People Eater was one of the big surprises of 1958.
Rock
and roll had arrived, Elvis and Buddy were well on the scene, one or two crooners
were still having hits, and then a well known American country singing comedian
made it bigger than at anytime since he started releasing songs in 1945 with a
song about a creature which ate purple people.
Within
three weeks of being released in 1958, Purple People Eater had been made a Gold
record in the US - having sold a million copies.
It
remained No.1 in America for six weeks, and also entered the singles sales charts
around the world.
Sheb
Wooley's real name was Ben Colder.
He
was well known in the US as a musical satirist - one of the first.
His
first recording was I Can't Live Without You in 1945. His last was Running Bare
in 1973.
He
was born near Nome in Alaska, the son of a weather forecaster, on April 10, 1921.
He
showed early musical promise by making sounds from clanging together icicles.
He
went on to record scores of songs, which were both released as singles and on
albums.
As
well as musical satire, he was a serious country music singer and composer with
No.1 country hits to his name including That's My Pa, released in 1962.
Sheb
was also known to millions of American TV viewers' appearing in Rawhide, Hee Haw
- for which he wrote the theme, the Ed Sullivan Show, and even starred with Angela
Lansbury in Agatha Christie's Murder She Wrote.
And
for film fans, some of his appearances were alongside the legends in some of Hollywood's
greatest films - Rio Bravo and War Wagon with John Wayne, High Noon with Gary
Cooper, Rocky Mountain with Errol Flynn, and The Outlaw Josey Wales with Clint
Eastwood.
In
his later life he toured extensively, doing as many as a hundred and fifty shows
a year across the USA.
Sadly,
Sheb died on 17 September 2003. He was eighty two.
On
the website, www.shebwooley.com he's quoted as saying that Purple People Eater
took him half an hour to write.
Here's
a mini quiz to see how well you know the song
1
How many eyes did the Purple People Eater have?
2
Why did he come to earth ?
3
How did Sheb know that the Purple People Eater had made it ?
Answers
1 One
2 To make it in a rock and roll band
3 He saw him on T
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