Whoopie Ti Yi Yo is a classic genuine Cowboy song. The song is an old one and like a lot of genuine Western music, it is a European folk ballad that was reset in a Western location. The original song was an Irish ballad about an old man being rocked in a rocking chair.
The first reference to this song of any kind was in Owen Wister's The Virginian. He'd no doubt heard it in Wyoming when he'd toured it prior to writing his novel which was published in 1893. The song was referenced by musicologist John Lomax in his 1910 work Cowboy Song and Other Frontier Ballads. It was first recorded in 1929.
In putting this up here, I had a variety of recordings I could have chosen, but I yielded to popular pressure and put up the Chris Ledoux variant as Ledoux remains very popular with Wyomingites. I'm the odd man out on that as I find Ledoux's voice rough and I'm generally not a fan.
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