Witch Doctor (song)

"Witch Doctor" is a 1958 American novelty song written and recorded by Ross Bagdasarian under the stage name of David Seville. Bagdasarian sang the song, varying the tape speeds to produce a high-pitched voice for the "witch doctor".

This technique was later used in his next song, "The Bird on My Head", and for the creation of the voices of his virtual band Alvin and the Chipmunks. The song became a number one hit and rescued Liberty Records from near-bankruptcy; it held number one for three weeks in the Billboard Hot 100 chart, ranked by Billboard as the No. 4 song for 1958.

In the song, the narrator asks a witch doctor for romantic advice because he has fallen in love with a girl; the witch doctor responds in a high-pitched, squeaky voice with a nonsense incantation which creates an earworm: "Oo-ee-oo-ah-ah, ting-tang, walla-walla-bing-bang."

History

Ross Bagdasarian, a Broadway actor who was a pianist in Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 film Rear Window, wrote the song, inspired by a book titled Duel with a Witch Doctor on his bookshelf. Bagdasarian had spent $200, a significant sum at that time, on a specialized tape recorder; while experimenting with the device, he had an idea of recording his voice at a different speed to create a dialogue between himself and the witch doctor. He sang in his own voice as normal, and then overdubbed the song with the voice of the "witch doctor", which is his own voice sung slowly but recorded at half speed on the tape recorder, then played back at normal speed (the voice was therefore sped up to become a high-pitched, squeaky one). Bagdasarian recorded the music first, and then experimented with the process for creating the singing voice for two months before recording it in the studio. It was said that when Si Waronker from the financially-troubled Liberty Records label heard the resulting song, they released it to reach the shops within 24 hours.