Shelby Fredrick "Sheb" Wooley (April 10, 1921 – September 16, 2003) was an American singer, songwriter, actor and comedian. He recorded a series of novelty songs including the 1958 hit rock and roll comedy single "The Purple People Eater"
and under the name Ben Colder the country hit "Almost Persuaded No. 2". As an actor, he portrayed Cletus Summers, the principal of Hickory High School and assistant coach in the 1986 film Hoosiers; Ben Miller, brother of Frank Miller in the film High Noon; Travis Cobb in The Outlaw Josey Wales, and also had a co-starring role as scout Pete Nolan in the television series Rawhide. Wooley is also credited as the voice actor who provided the Wilhelm scream and all of the other stock sound effects for Thomas J. Valentino's Major Records during the 1940s.
"The Purple People Eater" is a novelty song written and performed by Sheb Wooley, which reached No. 1 in the Billboard pop charts in 1958 from June 9 to July 14, No. 1 in Canada it reached No. 12 overall in the UK Singles Chart, and topped the Australian chart.
"The Purple People Eater" tells how a strange creature (described as a "one-eyed, one-horned, flying, purple people eater") descends to Earth, because it wants to be in a rock 'n' roll band. The premise of the song came from a joke told by the child of a friend of Wooley's; Wooley finished composing it within an hour.
The song establishes that the creature eats purple people, but not whether the creature is purple:
I said Mr. Purple People Eater, what's your line?
He said eating purple people, and it sure is fine,
But that's not the reason that I came to land
I wanna get a job in a rock 'n roll band.
The creature also declines to eat the narrator, "cause [he's] so tough".
The ambiguity of the song was present when it was originally played on the radio. In responses to requests from radio disc jockeys, listeners drew pictures that show a purple-colored "people eater".
The voice of the purple people eater is a sped-up recording, giving it a voice similar to, but not quite as high-pitched or as fast, as Mike Sammes's 1957 "Pinky and Perky", or Ross Bagdasarian's "Witch Doctor", another hit from earlier in 1958; and "The Chipmunk Song" which was released late in 1958. Alvin and the Chipmunks eventually covered "Purple People Eater" for their 1998 album The A-Files: Alien Songs. The sound of a toy saxophone was produced in a similar fashion, as the saxophone was originally recorded at a reduced speed.
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