hecklerspray Heroes - Shooby Taylor

"Hello, I’m Johnny Cash".

These are the words that first made us aware of the inaugural hecklerspray hero.

Our hero isn’t Johnny Cash, but a man who made his career by making noises over other people’s records: Shooby Taylor.

Shooby Taylor, also known as The Human Horn, was responsible
for some of the oddest pieces of music you’re ever likely to hear. His
stock-in-trade was to take another person’s song and sing along to it.
Well - we say sing, but Shooby’s vocals were so far removed from the realms of traditional singing that they slightly evade description.

The first Shooby song that hecklerspray heard was his version of Folsom Prison Blues from the Johnny Cash album At Folsom Prison.
Johnny introduces himself to a borderline-violent audience of prison
inmates in his usual aggressive way. As his band strike up the start of
the tune, something odd happens.

Cash gets as far as "I hear the train a-coming" when another voice - Shooby’s - bursts in "Svet allala bwet allala wheee,"
he sings over the top. Suddenly it’s not a song about one man’s lament
for taking the life of another, it’s instead a man from New York sort
of yodelling "hoppy poppy poppy poppy doppy dop".

Listen to his version of Stout-Hearted Man. It’s bizarre - more like a piece of Dada art than music.

William Taylor - the name Shooby came later, apparently a gift from Dizzy Gillespie
- had a long and largely unsuccessful career as a scat singer. Why
learn an instrument, he reasoned, when his voice was perfectly capable
of providing the same experience?

Large-scale recognition was always just out of Shooby’s reach. In 1983, Shooby performed on the TV show Amateur Night At The Apollo.
His eccentric scat stylings weren’t a hit with the studio audience, and
he was booed off after lasting only seven seconds. Humiliatingly, he
was chased from the stage by a tiny black tapdancer with a gun and a tophat.

Then in 1995 David Letterman requested that Shooby appeared on his show, but Shooby had just suffered a stroke and was out of action.

In 2002 a partial renaissance came courtesy of Irwin Chusid, The New York Times and Channel Four.
Sadly, Shooby was in such ill-health by this point that he couldn’t
fully appreciate his new found fame, and he died a year later.

Visit Shooby.com - a fantastic Shooby Taylor resource

[story by Stuart Heritage]