Where Have All the Whistlers Gone?

People don’t whistle much anymore.

It used to be so American, so evocative of our rugged individualism and independence, of a certain jaunty happy-go-luckiness. A fella whistled while he worked, whistled a happy tune, then wet his whistle with a cold one, and whistled at the girls going by.

Jiminy Cricket whistled, and the Seven Dwarfs, and Gene Kelly and Santa Claus and Woodrow Wilson and Charles Lindbergh and Albert Einstein.

Musical whistling went with derring-do and dancing in the rain and sauntering down the street, hands shoved in the pockets, hat brim at a rakish angle. The whistled theme of “The Andy Griffith Show” conjured up a small-town coziness that has vanished, if it ever existed at all.

Now people march to a different tune, and the street is a horrible raucous mess of jackhammers and sirens and the beep-beep-beep of big trucks backing up. A piercing trill or two could sound in protest.

Instead, people lower their voices and mutter into things like cell phones, or silence themselves, trudging along with Top 20 piped right into their inner ears.

Whistling is too weird, like polka music; too idiosyncratic, like addressing envelopes on a manual typewriter; too stubbornly nonconformist, like the mom at the awards banquet in Frye boots and fringed jacket.

Whistling is a relic from a less technological time, when folks had to amuse themselves. It’s front-porch culture. It’s loner art. It used to float around the school janitor who pushed a broom down empty halls.

Yet kids still try to whistle, puckering and huffing to no effect. One day, something comes out, and the joy is profound until they are silenced by modern mores and music videos. Except for the kids who are too stubborn.

Emily Eagan was one of those kids.

“I went through an obnoxious period, trying to be annoying,” she says, “but then my whistling became more sincere.” Now she’s 25, and the two-time International Women’s World Champion Whistler. She has a master’s in vocal performance and a Fulbright scholarship to study voice in the Hague.

“It’s life-affirming and full of humor,” she says of whistling. “There’s a sense of joyful insanity.”

So maybe that’s what has stilled the collective pucker. Insanity isn’t so joyful anymore.

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The American--and maybe world--capital of whistling is Louisburg, N.C., a town of 3,011 people and many more pigs, somewhere north of Raleigh. It’s home to the annual spring International Whistlers Convention, 28 years of it now, and the National Whistlers Museum.

“I never met anybody who could whistle like me until I came here,” says Steven Herbst, 51, an adman who’s had people trail him for blocks in Manhattan, transfixed.

Competitors come from as far as Vancouver and Switzerland to wait their turn in front of the microphone in the Louisburg College auditorium.

Backstage, an older lady in silver pumps and evening gown lines her lips with Chap Stick. She has been to the beauty parlor. She is one of many whistlers waiting.

The seats are filled with families and retirees and men in overalls and CAT caps, flecks of chewing tobacco at the corners of their mouths.

The sound quality is pretty good, and miking whistlers requires a certain delicacy of acoustical engineering so their music doesn’t come out all reverb and shrieks.

Onstage, Oregon rancher Patty Ediger ambles through “Cattle Call” in a cowgirl costume, pretending to lasso an assistant in a plush bovine costume. Dan Brown, from Ohio, uses drumsticks as oars in “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore.”

The purists don’t like these acts. They’re like hard-core baseball fans who hate the antics of team mascots.

Adult competition is serious, before a panel of music professionals who use standard vocal adjudication scoring. The sounds that pour forth from the whistlers are astonishing: cascading warbles, bell tones, tremolos and trills, syncopated crescendos, octaves of excitement.

Many of the same whistlers show up every year, members of a subset so peculiar they’re the only ones who understand one another.

They have annoyed their spouses and children and co-workers half to death. They have reduced their dogs to whimpering. Their obsession makes comrades out of the Toronto college administrator and the woman who keeps chickens way outside Denver and the New Orleans hotel products supplier who also teaches tai chi and the proper retired music teacher from Sedalia, Mo.

People tend to be disrespectful,” says Herbst, who won the men’s classical competition this year. “They liken it to hog-calling, until they hear it.”

He refuses to demean his instrument, which whistlers call the “puccolo,” by whistling any old jingle. “It’s like taking your Stradivarius to play ‘Turkey in the Straw.’ ”

“I always thought I was weird, and now I know it,” says Ernest Barreto, 32, a physics researcher at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. Right now he’s nervous. This is his first competition. His wife combs his hair.

He performs the Adagio and Rondo movements of the Mozart Flute Quartet in D, and you can feel the regulars tighten to alertness. A member of the Washington Chorus, Barreto has very good pitch and intricate phrasing.

And a strange style: Instead of puckering his lips, he keeps his mouth almost slack and works his cheeks in and out. He can’t really explain it; his style is why he came, hoping to find an explanation.

Mitch Hider, who emcees the competition and conducts the whistling workshop, tells Barreto he’s heard that style before, in a Mexican mariachi band.

“I wanted to know what the people were like who take this seriously,” says women’s grand champion Eagan, explaining how she showed up on a lark at her first competition last year--and blew away the field with her rich, centered tones.

This year, with a title to defend, she’s anxious, pacing about and whistling scales under her breath. She puts on some va-va-voom outfits. Her parents have come, and her aunt.

Hider hotly denies that people don’t whistle much anymore. “It’s just not true,” he insists. “What you don’t hear is whistling in popular music, because there is less attention to melody. It’s just personal, and private. People do it for themselves, to validate or acknowledge their existence.”

Terry Rappold, who won the men’s competition in popular music and dreams of having a whistling band strut through the streets of his home town, New Orleans, has a theory: “Whistling is a translation of music through the soul, and people are afraid to let their souls out.”