Klaus Kinski, Fitzcarraldo (1982)

Black Cats & Hoot Owls (With Sound Effects)

Clara Smith & Her Five Black Kittens - Black Cat Moan (Columbia, 1927)

Ma Rainey - Black Cat Hoot Owl Blues (Paramount, 1928)

Dolly Ross & Porter Grainger - Hootin' Owl Blues (Brunswick, 1927)

Wade Curtiss & His Rhythm Rockers - Puddy Cat (1964/1997)

Chat mystérieux, chat séraphique, chat étrange 

("Mysterious cat, seraphic strange cat") - Baudelaire

The fur harbours electricity and sends swift currents of this lightning up the arm of him who strokes the animal. Sometimes, alone with a cat in the dead silences of the night, I have watched the creature’s eyes suddenly dilate, her ears point back; with arched spine a startling, unexpected, unexplained prance across the floor follows; then puss settles back again to laundry and repose as if nothing had happened. What has happened? What has awakened this fit of wildness? Is it some noise unheard by humans, an unwelcome smell, or some reminiscence of the terrible mediaeval nights when the cat joined the witch in her broom-stick trails across the face of the moon? - Carl Van Vechten, The Cat & The Occult, 1922

That horror of horrors, "good taste", has often kept sound effects & other sonic onomatopoeia from clucking, whining, whistling & purring anywhere near the sanctified aeries of serious music, but even the whorehouse of popular music felt compelled to create a ghetto for such hijinks, Novelty Music. And while most listeners think immediately of Bobby "Boris" Pickett's "The Monster Mash", Ray Stevens' "The Streak", or any number of Dickie Goodman & David Seville records when asked to give an example of great Novelty Music, it's a grand & noble tradition whose squawkings, hoarse aspirations & mellifluous glossolalia are encountered well beyond the goofball musics of our demented youth. It has created some of the truly transcendent moments in both rock music ( The Trashmen's "Surfin' Bird") & in longhair music (Saint-Saens' Carnival of the Animals), but the ancient blues recordings that actually experimented with atmosphere (for novelty is atmosphere intensified with sonic tricks) are often the rarest, the least-heard. 

It seems no one wants to discuss studio trickery, no matter how primitive it may be, when discussing old blues & jazz records. Critics & aficionados flock to these records because they are so very "genuine", because they are hissing, growly dolmens that, by their very nature, eschew novelty. The vivid cat-yowls, carnal growling from voice & band, temperamental screeches & hoots from singing saws -- these paint the old mossy dolmens a feverish hot-pink.