Virality and the Yodel Boy
The idea of a video or meme going viral is such an interesting and fascinating concept that is best suited for the digital age. When something goes viral it is shared online through social media and other sites and garners hundreds of thousands and even millions of views. Items that can go viral are memes, videos, articles and other digital age media. For something to go “viral” it doesn’t need to be much. Recent viral memes have been simple: a still from the show SpongeBob Squarepants where he looks winded, a picture of LeBron James yelling at J.R. Smith when he screwed up in the finals, or SPOILER ALERT! When Spiderman says he doesn’t feel good in the new Avengers movie and then turns to ashes. Yet there was one video that went viral that really took hold of popular culture during April and May of 2018 — and that was the Yodel Boy.
The Yodel Boy is a viral video that was posted on Twitter this past March. The video is of Mason Ramsey, a young boy singing a version of the Hank Williams song “Lovesick Blues” in his local Walmart. In the video, Ramsey is tapping his Cowboy Boots as he sings along to the song while local shoppers stop to appreciate the young boy’s talent. The original tweet gathered over two million views and over half a million retweets. Yodel Boy or Walmart Boy, both titles work, quickly caught the attention of Ellen DeGeneres and he was brought onto her show as a guest. While on the show he performed the song, received a college scholarship from Walmart, and was told he would be performing at the Grand Ole Opry. He later made a surprise visit to Coachella wearing his usual cowboy hat and oversized belt buckle. Mason Ramsey’s entire life changed when one person tweeted his video, what made that video go viral and not others?
Part of the reason why the Yodel Boy meme went viral is because it is unique and different. There is such a human aspect in the video. The yodel boy is each and every one of us when we were younger “performing” for our parents, except Mason was at Walmart and somebody tweeted his video. This meme could have been anybody, we all have hopes and dreams and all try to act upon them. Mason had the dream of becoming a famous singer even before he went viral; it is because of the tweet that his life was changed.
Because the video of Mason went viral, it set off a series of real life consequences. To start off this video completely changed the life of a young boy and his family. Before he was viral Mason lived in a small town in Illinois and would sing for his Grandmother as well as at the local Walmart for fun. After the video went viral Ramsey has traveled around the country performing and making guest appearances on talk shows. Mason at this point has even come out with his own EP. Nine months ago he was still a small-town boy with a big dream and now that dream is becoming a reality for him. Besides changing his life, the video impacted memes that would form. In the spring of this past year there have been hundreds of thousands of memes that have come about as a result of Mason’s video going viral. Some have original where they have made a new meme, while others have been remixed and combined an already existing meme with the Yodel Boy to make a new meme. This video going viral has also changed the music industry. Since the video went viral Hank Williams version of the song “Lovesick Blues” has seen almost a 2,500 percent increase in Spotify streams. This spike in streaming was seen between March 26th and April 9th. The fact that a viral meme is able to change the listening and streaming trends in the general public is amazing. Through the act of going viral, Mason Ramsey was able to bring back the music from almost seventy years ago back into the public eye, or rather ear. This viral video also added to another trend of remixing quotes and turning them into songs. One such EDM remix of Ramsey’s rendition of Lovesick Blues has turned into a very popular song, it has almost six million streams on Sound Cloud. It’s so popular that it has been played at clubs and at sporting events. Who would have thought that a thirty second clip of a boy singing would have had effected so many people?
I feel that this video went viral today because of the fact that we live in the digital age. We are able to communicate instantly with people from all around the world, within seconds our thoughts can be shared online for the world to see. Stories and ideas still went viral before the digital age; it was just much harder for them to do so. In fact, one might argue that fairy tales were at one point viral. Everybody knows the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, it has been shared millions of times and is known around the world. In addition to oral stories, one could look at pamphlets during the times of the printing press like Common Sense by Thomas Paine as viral. People were able to sell thousands of copies of pamphlets, word was spread and suddenly everyone wanted to read them. Before social media one way items would go viral is from chain emails. These emails would get sent from person to person saying that the receiver would have to forward the email or else something would happen to them.
I feel that the idea of virality is best suited for the digital age. Everything we do today is instant, Netflix, Amazon, Spotify all of these provide instant gratification in some sense. You can watch a movie immediately, buy something and have it shipped to you the next day or listen to an album the moment it comes out instead of going to the store to buy it. Virality just fits for the digital age, the fact that you can share a picture or a video onto your Twitter then within a week over a million people have interacted with that piece of media can really only happen with social media and the digital age.
