Over the years, I’ve been asked many times if I’m any relation to Sheb Wooley, the Erick native who left an enduring mark in music, movies and television. It seems logical that I would be, since our last names are spelled exactly the same (there are a lot of variations) and we’re both from Oklahoma. However, I was born in Minnesota, and my research has led me to believe that I come from a different line of Wooleys.
But, while I’m likely no relative, I’ve been a fan of Shelby Frederick Wooley for some time. As I imagine is the case with most baby boomers, I first became aware of him in the summer of 1958, when a wacky rockabilly-style number, featuring a dash of the sped-up vocal technique that would soon be used by musician David Seville to create the voices of the Chipmunks, was launched like a Sputnik out of radio speakers all across the country. Written and performed by Wooley, playing off the then-current national fascination with outer space, science-fiction, and flying saucers, “Purple People Eater” stayed at the very top of the Billboard magazine pop charts for an impressive six weeks, with more than a million copies sold.
And, while “Purple People Eater” was by far his most famous song, Wooley hardly stopped there. Over the next 30-plus years, he’d launch no fewer than 18 singles onto the national pop and/or country-music charts – including his No. 1 country hit, 1962’s “That’s My Pa,” and a run of successful parody singles released under the name “Ben Colder.” In addition, Sheb Wooley was a working actor, part of the ensemble cast (along with a young Clint Eastwood) of the successful TV series Rawhide, as well as a supporting player in a number of other television shows and movies big and small, the former including classics like 1952’s High Noon, 1956’s Giant, and 1986’s Hoosiers. His final movie appearance before his 2003 death was in 1988’s Purple People Eater, starring Neil Patrick Harris and Ned Beatty and based on the hit Wooley tune from four decades earlier.
Other Wooley achievements of note include giving a young Roger Miller his first guitar and teaching him chords – Miller grew up in Erick; his cousin was Wooley’s first wife – and combining his musical and acting talents as one of the stars of the 1963 MGM musical Hootenanny Hoot, filmed to cash in on what many now refer to as The Great Folk Music Scare of the early 1960s.
For all of that, however, Sheb Wooley’s most lasting vocal and big-screen achievement may be one that never got him any official credit. And while it’s possible you may never have heard of it, if you’ve watched movies on any sort of a regular basis over the past, oh, seventy years or so, chances are very good that you’ve heard it.
It’s called the Wilhelm Scream.
Easily accessible on YouTube, it’s “arguably the most famous sound effect in the history of cinema.” That’s what Domagoj Valjak believes, anyway. On April 23, 2018, the Vintage News website (vintagenews.com) published a piece by the writer that supported his thesis.
“As of the beginning of this year,” Valjak wrote, “the scream appeared in as many as 372 films and numerous television series. Some of the popular classics of late 20th and early 21st cinema, including the Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and The Lord of the Rings franchises, [Quentin] Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes, and even Disney’s Toy Story feature this classic sound effect.”
There are plenty more, too. In fact, not only does the original Wilhelm Scream show up in the hundreds of movies and television shows Valjak cites; imitations of the effect also appear in dozens, probably hundreds, more. Writing for the spring 2025 issue of The Phantom of the Movies’ VideoScope magazine, voice actor Bill Timony told about how, some time ago, he and others who work in the profession “started sneaking our own Wilhelm Scream impressions into our work.” He went on to cite such features as Bowfinger, Salt, and The Patriot as recipients of his personal homages to the classic effect.
For a half-century, Sheb Wooley didn’t get credit for the Wilhelm Scream. He’d first done it for a 1951 Gary Cooper western called Distant Drums, released by Warner Brothers. In the picture, Wooley had a small, uncredited role as Private Jessup, a soldier who gets pulled to his death by an alligator in the Florida swamps. The accompanying yell, done in postproduction, was what would become known as the Wilhelm Scream.
According to VideoScope’s Timoney, Wooley also recorded three other “similar-sounding screams of various lengths” in his post work for the film. These were all filed in the Warner Bros. audio library for potential reuse.
A couple of years later, Warner Bros. pulled one of them out and used it in a 3-D western called The Charge at Feather River, when a Private Wilhelm (played by another character actor, Ralph Brooke) got shot in the leg with an arrow. And that was only the beginning. Throughout the ’50s and ’60s, Warners recycled the scream through tons of their movies, including the giant-ant picture Them! (1953), PT 109 (1963) and The Wild Bunch (1969).
Then, in the mid-’70s, a sound designer named Ben Burtt ran across the scream while working on the original Star Wars (1977). Tracking it back to Private Wilhelm’s cry of agony in The Charge at Feather River (which goes a long way toward explaining why it’s not known as the Jessup Scream), Burtt used it in Star Wars and then began slipping it into as many other pictures as he could. Others followed suit. Its use became a kind of in-joke among movie-sound editors and soon, top-name directors like Tarantino and Peter Jackson were getting in on the fun, appropriating the Wilhelm Scream for their own films.
By most accounts, Burtt not only gets credit for naming the effect, but also for finding out it was Sheb Wooley who performed it. Burtt apparently ran onto a memorandum in the Warner Bros. archives that listed the names of the people who’d recorded vocal sound effects for Distant Drums. One of them was Wooley, and Burtt became convinced he was the man behind the scream. He couldn’t be 100% sure, though, because by the time he discovered the memo, Wooley had already passed.
It took the famed British newspaper the Times of London to all but lock down Sheb Wooley as the Wilhelm Scream’s creator. In a May 21, 2005 story headlined “Hollywood’s loudest secret unlocked,” staff member Jack Malvern wrote, “The name [of the Wilhelm’s Scream’s originator] was finally confirmed this week when The Times contacted Linda Dotson, Wooley’s widow.
“‘He always used to joke about how he was so great about screaming and dying in films,’ she said. ‘I did know that his scream had been in some films, the older westerns, but I did not know about Star Wars and all. He would have got such a kick out of this. He would say, “I may be old but I’m still in the movies.’”
Sheb Wooley might also get a kick out of the fact that a long-lived punk band out of New Bedford, Mass. is named A Wilhelm Scream. And his alter-ego of Ben Colder, created by Wooley as a rum-dum country entertainer, would most certainly appreciate knowing that, for a time, Vermont’s Magic Hat Brewing Company offered a seasonal brew called Wilhelm Scream Pumpkin Ale.
