The Trill of the Chase

I step onto a stage in Kawasaki, Japan, and walk to a microphone. When I hear my name, I remove a pitch pipe from my pocket and sound an F#, the starting note for my arrangement of Mozart’s “Eine kleine Nachtmusik.” 

I look out into an audience of about 200 people, mostly Japanese, then down to a table with five solemn judges. I bow. The next five minutes will decide if I’ve got the lips and breath—and skill and guts—to hold my own against the best whistlers in the world. I breathe in and blow.

It’s a moment six and a half months—or maybe 65 years—in the making. I grew up in Wilmington learning to whistle from my Aunt Sue (the only family practitioner), but then I slowly absorbed an unwritten lesson: Whistling isn’t something you do in public. Whistling is something you do in the privacy of your car or shower. I thought, as I once sang in a community theater production of Camelot, it is something only “simple folks do.” 

I got a glimpse of serious whistling as a reporter for WRAL News in my 30s. Not just serious, either—competitive. My editor sent me to cover a whistling championship in Louisburg, a small town north of Raleigh, where I spent the day watching a parade of puckerers young and old. 

Offstage, they whistled in the hallways and bathrooms. They whistled into each other’s faces. They asked each other how to make whistle sounds, where to find good background tracks, how to shorten long songs, and which other whistlers they should listen to. There seemed to be a whole subculture of people who took whistling very seriously. Could I be one of them? 

I parked the idea for decades. Then, last fall, I wrote a blog post arguing that each of us, if we cut the criteria narrowly enough, is probably world-class at something. But … what was that for me? 

I looked up the whistling contest I’d covered years ago. It was no longer held in Louisburg, though; nowadays it is in Japan. I decided to audition anyway. 

Because there are no popular songs exclusively written for whistling, I started by looking for audition pieces heavy on woodwinds—clarinet, flute—or harmonica. Over the course of two eight-hour solo car rides, I sorted through 46 songs, ranging from Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” to Thelonious Monk’s “‘Round Midnight”, and started narrowing them down. Then, in December, I submitted two audio files to the contest judging panel for consideration (video isn’t allowed; judges don’t want to be swayed by visual appearance), and paid the 3,000 yen entry fee (a little less than $20). 

I’d nearly forgotten about it when, four months later, I got the email: “We are pleased to inform you that you have been selected to participate.” I could see Aunt Sue beaming down at me.

The thrill of receiving my acceptance letter was followed by the gut-punch of the judges’ critique: They liked my “warm tone,” but they really didn’t like my portamento (sliding between notes). They also thought I used “too much vibrato.” They ranked me ninth of the 10 people selected in my division, senior a cappella. But, hey: I was in!

More Than a Novelty

Anthropologists believe humans have likely whistled since their earliest days, whether to coordinate hunts, herd animals, or simply communicate over long distances. 

Musical whistling has come and gone over the centuries, with the most recent revivals coming during the early days of vaudeville, when a whistler might slot in as a “novelty act,” then again in the Big Band era, when a whistler might perform one verse of a popular tune or the brass section might stand and collectively whistle 16 bars.

By the mid-1950’s, public whistling had all but disappeared. Radio stations wanted rock n’ roll, not whistle tunes. Then, in 1974, a tiny spark lit in an unlikely place: the hinterlands of the North Carolina Piedmont. 

Allen DeHart, the chair of the Franklin County Arts Council and director of the local folk festival, received a strange entry for its musical competition. Darrell Williams from Durham wanted to whistle an original song, “Little River Blues.” After some reportedly heated debate, DeHart and the other organizers accepted Williams’ entry. 

Then he won. 

“You might call it the warble heard round the world,” DeHart recalled in the documentary Pucker Up: The Fine Art of Whistling.

After Williams won again in 1975, DeHart realized he had something special and moved to capitalize on it. He created an entire festival devoted to the art, which eventually became an annual National Whistlers Convention.

DeHart was a force of nature, recalls Lillian Benton, a spunky former Marine Corps communications specialist, now 87, who helped with several of the events. As the “frontman” for the competitive whistling world, DeHart had an eye for marketing and a way of influencing people. “As long as he was heading it,” Benton told me, “we were going to have a whistling contest.” 

By 1981, DeHart had established the National Whistlers Museum in Louisburg. In 1986, he created the Whistlers Hall of Fame, with somewhat flexible criteria. While Bing Crosby (you may remember his whistle verse on “White Christmas”?) was long-gone before being honored in 1987, DeHart’s ambition was clear. 

Within 10 years of the festival’s founding, more than 3,000 entrants were submitting audition tapes to come to Louisburg (whose total population is only about 3,000) for the spring competition. Winners regularly appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, then later on Late Night with David Letterman. Finally, in 1997, DeHart took the next logical step: He renamed the event the “International Whistlers Convention.”

In 2005, Pucker Up captured the color and suspense of the previous year’s championship, during which newcomer Geert Chatrou, a chain-smoking domestic violence counselor from the Netherlands, upset New Jersey turkey hauler Joe Sodano, Florida boat captain “Whistling” Tom Bryant, and four-time Grand Champion Chris Ullman. The film became a whistling cult classic, inspiring an entire generation of warblers. 

“Louisburg, North Carolina, is the mecca for whistlers,” former champion Steve Herbst says in the film, “If you wanna be at the top of the whistling world, you have to go to Louisburg.”

 There was more to the allure of the event than that. The contest wasn’t cutthroat or cold, as other world championships can be. Both the competitors and the organizers “were just amazingly friendly,” Ullman told me. “You could meld together the friendliness with serious competition.”

Most importantly, the event gave Franklin County something to brag about. “It put Louisburg on the map, so to speak,” recalled Robert Poole, who managed the auditorium where the competition was held. Residents were proud to have people from all over the world come to their small town. 

But the event couldn’t outlive its charismatic founder. As DeHart aged, he hoped to find someone in Louisburg to take the reins. No one would. 

“Some people in town were just unhappy we were spending money on this thing,” said Benton, the former volunteer. The arts councils that had previously sponsored the festival didn’t bite, either. (Was whistling enough of an “art” to justify the expense?) After one final contest in 2013, whistling left Louisburg.

Today, if you go looking in Louisburg, you can find a tattered sign outside the basement of the adult corrections center for the Franklin County International Convention Office and Museum. Inside there are the flags of the 20 or so countries where competitors came from, scrapbooks, posters, videotapes, posters and programs squeezed into a 30-by-30-foot room. It’s all that remains of the whistling contest. 

“When was the last time someone was down here?” I asked facilities maintenance director Chris Jones when I visited this past spring. In nine years, he said, I was the only visitor.

It’s Big in Japan

My wife, Ret, and I arrived in Kawasaki, Japan, in mid-June, a week before this year’s competition. I hoped to settle into the 13-hour time difference, get my lips accustomed to higher humidity, and put in at least an hour a day of practice. 

The practice part proved problematic. On day three, during my daily session in our hotel’s 13th floor stairwell (whistlers love the echoes that come off hard surfaces), I was in the middle of my take on Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” (this tricky section required imitating a clarinet, trilling a note, then slowly sliding up an octave without running out of breath) when a security guard informed me through hand signals that I couldn’t practice there. He glared silently until I packed up my things and left. 

I asked a Japanese friend to call the man at the front desk and clarify where I could practice. “Not in the stairwell,” he said. “Not in the room. Not anywhere in the hotel.”

For the remainder of the week, I rented private rooms by the hour at nearby Rainbow Karaoke. Between whistle songs, Ret and I threw down, singing new versions of karaoke classics like “Ain’t No Mountain (even Fuji) High Enough” and “Summer Lovin’ (in Kawasaki).”

On Friday, the first day of the competition, we arrived at the site of the World Whistlers Convention, a four-story beige building called, for reasons nobody seems to know, “Scrum21.”

Ryosuke Takeuchi, a six-time Louisburg whistling competitor, brought the competition here in 2014, after DeHart passed the torch. Takeuchi felt he had to do it. “When Allen looked around the world, I was probably the only person who could take on the responsibility,” Takeuchi told me. “It’s such an interesting idea, I wanted it to continue.”

It may have been interesting, but it wasn’t easy. Takeuchi faced many of the same problems as the founder—finding volunteers, getting support, overcoming contestants’ language barriers, and recruiting judges, all on a razor-thin budget. In Kawasaki, an overlooked industrial center south of Tokyo, Takeuchi found a town not unlike Louisburg, in some ways: happy for some good publicity and willing to rent out an auditorium for an affordable price. 

As I watched the contest’s early rounds, I was impressed by the range. Besides a cappella whistlers there was a hikifuki division, where competitors accompany themselves on a guitar, piano, or ukulele (in one case, a woman whistled while playing a xylophone and an accordion) and “allied arts,” where whistlers can perform in groups, or with dancers or visual artists.  

I remembered something Ullman, the former champion, had told me. There are three types of competitive whistlers: tourists (those who are just happy to be there, but have no chance of winning); local hotshots (who may be the best in their neighborhood or state, but are about to be humbled); and then a small few who have a legitimate chance to win. I mentally slotted myself into the middle tier.

That summary tracked pretty well with what I saw. Some folks changed keys in the middle of their songs; others blew directly into the microphone (whistlers have to blow across it to avoid distortion); many got nervous in front of the judges. But two or three performed gobsmacking, pyrotechnic, acrobatic, virtuosic whistling gymnastics like I’d never heard, and certainly never performed, in my life. 

They whistled exhaling, then—with no change of tone—whistled equally well inhaling. Then they did both, alternating inhales and exhales at a frantic pace, like dogs panting musically. They “oodled” (moving their tongue back and forth quickly to get two tones out at almost the same time). They chirped and warbled like birds, going up a couple of octaves for 15-second arias. Some performances came off almost like a cross between bird calls and bebop jazz: I admired the skill, but sometimes I had trouble hearing the melody.

I wouldn’t be competing until Sunday, in the “senior a cappella” division, and I was the only American in my group. The two obvious favorites in my category had placed second and third in 2024, so I tried to figure out some sort of competitive advantage. Maybe, I told myself, what I lacked in experience I could make up for with pluck and enthusiasm. My mantra? “I am energetic and emotional.” Plus I had a secret: for my second song, I’d be whistling one of Japan’s most popular “oyaji” (“old man”) karaoke songs: “My Way,” made famous by none other than Frank Sinatra.

I’d also be doing it in a style I bet the judges hadn’t heard—the Aretha Franklin version. Shock and awe? Maybe. Confusion? Also maybe.

Whistling in the Dark 

This year’s event had all the stars. Yuki Takeda, 34, who had won eight times in international competition in multiple categories, gave a lecture on the history of Western whistling before he competed in the adult a cappella and hikifuki categories. 

Yusuke Matsumura, the 33-year-old 2024 overall champion, gave a demonstration, too. Both men showcased their three-octave ranges, sophisticated whistling techniques, and deep musical knowledge, all while delivering stellar performances of both classical and popular pieces. 

Takeda and Matsumura are key parts of an ever-expanding competitive whistle world. In 2020, Takeda co-founded the International Whistlers Guild, which now hosts the Global Whistling Championship, an online-only event designed to attract more competitors worldwide. Matsumura, a former tuba player who is now a bass opera singer in Germany, won the global online title in 2021. 

There’s also another international whistling competition now, bringing the total to three. A new documentary, Whistle, focuses on the Masters of Musical Whistling competition held every other year in Hollywood, and features Takeda prominently. The buzz that documentary has created is, in turn, spurring talk in the community of even more championships, including one in South Korea, another in India, and a third in Italy. But, unfortunately, not a single one will be in Louisburg. 

When it’s finally my turn at the microphone, I’m surprisingly nervous. I’ve sung in plays and concerts for decades, but performing alone, with no words and no other instruments, trying to squeeze an entire performance through a 1-millimeter aperture suddenly feels like a naked bungee jump. 

I forget to change octaves in one section of my Mozart piece and have to take a breath in a weird place. I forget to bow afterward and am still beating myself up about it as I launch into “My Way,” the tune I am hoping will be just weird enough to captivate. 

The audience does not, apparently, fall under the sway of my jazz-blues approach. Even so, I stay on pitch, make no major mistakes, and keep my promise to myself: I am energetic and emotional. 

After my performance, I exit through the lobby of Scrum21 and am stopped by a Japanese man who has just watched me. “Your whistling…” he says—I wait, hopefully—“Was very… interesting. Very… enthusiastic.” Hmm.

I return to my seat to watch the others. “I have you third… so far,” says my ever-honest wife. Then the elegant Noriko Ikenoya, delivers a different version of “my” Mozart melody, but better. She takes her time, hits every note with precision, breathes perfectly, looks supremely confident. Ret leans over and whispers, simply: “OK, now maybe you’re fourth?” 

Bringing It Home to N.C.

Japan sweeps the podium. Though I’m not exactly sure where I finished, I know my pitch-pipe dream of somehow reclaiming North Carolina’s glory has fallen flat. 

The subtle nods to Louisburg are still there, though. All announcements are made in both Japanese and English. The event’s official logo features a cardinal, our state bird. DeHart is prominently featured on the back of the program, and the convention’s website shows a letter he wrote just before his death in 2016 officially conveying the event to his Japanese successors. 

The North Carolina influence lives on in other whistling corners, too. At the biennial  Hollywood event, the Masters of Musical Whistling present the Allen DeHart Award to the person who has most expanded “awareness, enjoyment, and respect of musical whistling as fine art.” Two of the judges in Kawasaki are former Louisburg competitors.

And Takeda traces his entry to this world to a television interview he watched that featured two Japanese teenagers just back from winning in Louisburg. He won the teen category the following year, starting the career of the most-decorated whistler in history. 

This year, Takeda added two more awards to that legacy, winning both the adult a cappella and hikifuki divisions. On Sunday evening, the hundred or so remaining competitors were called on stage to join him for the close of the 47th World Whistlers Convention. 

I was back home in Raleigh three weeks later, when out of the blue, I received a more comprehensive set of judges’ comments via email. The panel thought I had a “beautiful tone” in my performance of “Eine kleine Nachtmusik,” but said I strayed too far from the original song. They found my arrangement of “My Way” to be “heartwarming,” with “groove and mood,” even if they also thought it was a little “husky.” 

Still, I performed, they thought, with “manly coolness.” It’s a phrase I’m not sure will ever again be applied to a whistling performance—and, my wife is quick to add, probably not to me, either. 

There is one more bit of news in the comments. I did, in fact, finish fourth in my division.