BOOTLEG FILES 789: “Henrietta and Myrna Sing ‘Go Tell It On The Mountain’” (bizarre public access television segment from the late 1980s).
LAST SEEN: On YouTube.
AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: None.
REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: People happily borrow the footage for their own wacky videos.
CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: Unlikely.
Viral videos emerge from the least likely sources, and without any planning they somehow take on a life of their own. As we sail deeper into the Christmas season, I would like to turn attention to a holiday-inspired viral video that has become something of an anti-classic that spawned tribute and parody videos.
This video first turned up on YouTube in December 2008 via the account belonging to CGE-TV. The acronym stands for Classical Gas Emissions, which is also the name of a website featuring a treasure trove of warped ephemera combed from the fringiest of pop culture fringes.
The video in question comes from a community access television broadcast, but the source for the material is not identified. The video opens with the show’s host, an older woman in a floral sweater, wishing the viewers Christmas greetings with spiritual lacings in her good cheers. She is sitting in a barebones set with a vase of paper flowers on a table as her sole prop. She informs the viewers that Henrietta and Myrna Neudorf are going to sing, and the camera suddenly goes into a close-up of the paper flowers that quickly becomes an out-of-focus shot.
From there, the soundtrack starts to become polluted with a country-twangy instrumental track of the old gospel standard “Go Tell It On The Mountain” and we get to see Henrietta and Myrna. Never in the history of music has there been such a weirdly mismatched singing duo: an elderly, somewhat gnomish woman in a floral sweater – that type of garment must have been the latest trend among the old ladies involved in the show – and a taller young woman with very long hair, a cranberry-red smearing of lipstick and a black jacket. There is no obvious resemblance between them, so it is unclear how they are related.
The older woman (whom I assume is Henrietta) is holding a microphone while the younger woman (Myrna?) is standing behind a mic stand with her arms folded in front of her. The duo begins singing, if you can call it that. Henrietta has a thin, eggshell-fragile voice that is slightly behind the music while Myrna is barely audible. Myrna is staring off-camera with a vaguely disgruntled look while Henrietta is looking straight at the camera while projecting the impression of a cod laying on ice in a fish market.
During the song, the two sing the chorus while Henrietta solos on the hymn’s lyrical passages. While Henrietta’s sincerity is not in doubt, her talent isn’t immediately obvious. Swaying gently back and forth without being in sync with the music, she manages to bypass the stirring imagery of the hymn in favor of a flat, monotonous recitation.
During the segment, the camera zooms between the women and winds up filming the blank blue-walled studio background, which is understandable as it has more color than either lady. During a musical interlude, the pair stands motionless, as if they somehow got imprisoned in a game of freeze tag and cannot figure out an escape.
Late in the song, Henrietta glances and smiles at Myrna, who ignores her, and then Henrietta gives a tiny oomph of power to amplify her voice. When the song finally wraps, Henrietta abruptly stops while Myrna gets in the last stanza on her own, only to quicky stop when she realizes she is without accompaniment. The video ends with a shot of the out-of-focus paper flowers that started Henrietta and Myrna’s foray into song.
My research has determined Henrietta and Myrna were a mother and daughter from Steinbach, a city in the Canadian province of Manitoba. Their appearance was on a community access television program broadcast from Winnipeg – the blog The View From Seven pegs this appearance from the late 1980s, which seems likely based on Myrna’s hairstyle. Myrna might have been in her late teens or early twenties when this video was made – an online copy of the Steinbach Carillion newspaper from September 1997 announces her engagement, which is the only media attention that she ever received outside of this video.
Over the years, Henrietta and Myrna have inspired a number of YouTubers to have fun with their unlikely performance. Several comedy duos have donned ill-fitting wigs to channel Henrietta and Myrna’s song styling, while others have incorporated the duo into remixes with zany new musical backing.
However, the original gem still triumphs for its naïve and (yes) weird spin on a holiday classic. Go tell it on the mountain that Henrietta and Myrna are brilliant, if only for the wrong reasons.
IMPORTANT NOTICE: While this weekly column acknowledges the presence of rare film and television productions through the so-called collector-to-collector market, this should not be seen as encouraging or condoning the unauthorized duplication and distribution of copyright-protected material, either through DVDs or Blu-ray discs or through postings on Internet video sites.
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