Yippee ki ay

I encountered this phrase at the end of the new Bruce Willis movie “Live Free or Die Hard“.  It’s his signature phrase from the earlier movies in the series:  ”Die Hard“, “Die Hard 2 – Die Harder“, and “Die Hard with a Vengeance“.  I had to know where it came from.

It’s a variant of cowboy yodelling.  The most famous song that contains these sounds is “I’m an old cowhand from the Rio Grande“, which was written in 1936 by Johnny Mercer.

Bing Crosby recorded it for the the 1936 movie “Rhythm on the Range” and Roy Rogers recorded it for the 1943 movie “King of the Cowboys“.  There were also versions by other famous singers, such as Frank Sinatra, Harry Connick Jr., and Ray Charles.

There are a wide variety of spellings for these sounds.  Yippee is also rendered as yippie, yippe, and yippy.  Ki can be kay and kai.  Ay is sometimes a, aye, yah, and sometimes combined with ki to form kayah.

So Willis is alluding back to the wild days of the American cowboy, with a twist of humor, since the song is actually about a Texan who drives a Ford V-8 and learned all his songs from the radio.  :->