Elmo Tanner
William Elmo Tanner, known as Elmo Tanner (August 8, 1904 – December 20, 1990) was an American whistler, singer, bandleader and disc jockey, best known for his whistling on the chart-topping song “Heartaches” with the Ted Weems Orchestra. Tanner and Weems recorded the song for two record companies within five years. Neither recording was successful originally. The song became a hit for both record companies after a Charlotte, North Carolina, disk jockey played it at random in 1947.
Tanner was originally hired by Weems as a vocalist; the bandleader discovered Tanner's whistling ability while the band was traveling to an engagement. Like Bing Crosby, he was able to whistle from his throat due to the muscles in his larynx. He subsequently became a featured performer as a whistler, earning the nicknames "Whistler’s Mother’s Boy", "The Whistling Troubador," and "the nation’s best-known whistler". He began appearing in films as part of the Ted Weems Orchestra in 1936; his first film role was in The Hatfields and McCoys, and he later appeared in the movie Swing, Sister, Swing (1938) and the musical film short, Swing Frolic (1942). Weems considered Tanner's whistling important enough to his orchestra that in 1939 he insured Tanner's throat for $10,000 ($231,459 in 2025). Besides musical whistling, he also imitated birds for Disney.
After a failed attempt at running a restaurant in his native Nashville in the early 1950s, he toured with the Elmo Tanner Quartet until 1958, when he found work as a disc jockey in Florida. After working as an auto dealer in the 1960s, in the early 1970s he resumed musical activity, singing with a St. Petersburg, Florida-based quartet.
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