Editor Ira is here with a dive into the weird world of hunting carols.

It's deer hunting season in the Upper Midwest. That may not mean a whole lot to our more urban-centric reading audience, but those of you in rural environs know that deer hunting season is a big deal. Where I'm from in rural Western Wisconsin, it was arguably the biggest deal of them all, an annual event that bordered on a religious holiday. Kids missed school, parents missed work, and even my stickler basketball coach gave the team a day off from practice because he wanted to get out to the woods himself.

I was the only boy in my grade school class who didn't hunt (not as big a claim as it sounds, as I represented 20% of the boys in a class of 11 students [I told you I was rural]), so the enthusiasm was lost on me. Even as a pacifist with an aversion to spending half of November being cold in a tree, though, I still had a reason to look forward to deer season: hunting carols!

Hunting carols are just what they sound like, musical odes to the deer hunting holiday.

Every year when deer season rolled around, you could depend on just about every radio station in the greater Sparta, Wisconsin area to start shuffling hunting carols into their rotations. These were the rare songs that transcended radio genres and formats. Hunting carols got played on the Top 40 station, the adult contemporary station, and the country station (Sparta's own WCOW* – again, we were rural). You could buy cassettes of hunting carols at the checkout counters of all the local gas stations. They were a very specific cultural phenomenon.

There were two main pillars of the genre. The first of those is "Second Week of Deer Camp" by Da Yoopers, a sloppy alt-polka sung in a thick Northwoods accent whose lyrics celebrate the slovenly camaraderie of hanging out in a deer camp with your buddies under the guise of outdoorsmanship. As the chorus puts it, "We drink, play cards, and shoot da bull, but never shoot no deer / The only time we leave da camp is when we go for beer / Da second week of deer camp is the greatest time of year."

It's a very catchy tune with more genuinely clever lyrics than you might expect in a novelty song about deer hunting. That's because Da Yoopers are established comedy professionals. Taking their name from slang for their fellow residents of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, the five-person team started in the late '70s as specialists in regionally specific musical and sketchy comedy poking fun at the Yooper lifestyle.

That would seem to be quite a niche schtick, but it's been an enduring one. 1983's "Second Week of Deer Camp" was the novelty song equivalent of a smash hit, earning regular airplay on the Dr. Demento radio show and becoming an annual anthem not just in the U.P. and Wisconsin, but in exotic locales like West Virginia and Sioux City, South Dakota. It even spawned a music video and a less-iconic sequel.

Da Yoopers themselves have proven just as enduring as their signature song. They've released 12 studio albums on their independent label, You Guys Records, which produced several other novelty hits. Their "Jingle Bells" parody "Rusty Chevrolet" remains a regular feature on Midwestern holiday playlists. The core group of Yoopers still records and performs together, and they operate a successful roadside shop and museum in the U.P. called "Da Yoopers Tourist Trap."

All great innovators eventually spawn imitators, which brings me to the other towering song in the hunting carol canon, "Da Turdy Point Buck." This song was ubiquitous every November in my neck of the woods for most of the '90s. (Wikipedia says it came out in 1989, but other sources have it as 1992. I'm inclined to believe the latter because that's definitely the year when my friend Tim recited it word for word every day in eighth-grade science class.) It's a "deer-huntin', rappin' tale" about a "dead drunk" hunter with a heavy Wisconsin accent who encounters a mythical 30-point trophy buck.

(For those who didn't grow up immersed in hunting terminology, deer antlers are kept as trophies. The higher the number of points on the antlers, the more desirable the trophy. A 10-pointer is considered a great success. A 30-point buck would be the trophy buck of all trophy bucks.)

"Da Turdy Point Buck" is widely regarded as Da Yoopers' second hunting carol triumph, which is too bad because it's not by Da Yoopers. It's the work of Bananas at Large, a trio of teachers from Amherst Junction, Wisconsin, population 377 as of the 2010 census. I've heard "Weird Al" Yankovic complain about the Napster era, when every parody song on music download sites was mistakenly attributed to him, no matter how off-brand or obscene. That's also the situation faced by Bananas at Large, whose signature song has been credited to Da Yoopers online for decades. For some reason people have a hard time imagining that there could be more than one regionally successful Reagan/Bush-era Upper Midwestern novelty band recording comedic deer-hunting anthems in an exaggerated dialect.

(To their credit, the official Da Yoopers website explicitly mentions that they're not responsible for "Da Turdy Point Buck." Or, for that matter, "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer" by Elmo and Patsy.)

Properly attributed or not, "Da Turdy Point Buck" looms large in the memory of anyone who grew up in rural Wisconsin in the 1990s. Despite the similarities, the Bananas song distinguishes itself from the Yoopers track by loading up on hunting- and Wisconsin-specific details, from freezing in a tree stand to our narrator's physically impossible hunting rifle to a gratuitous but very welcome slam on visiting hunters from Illinois. To date, the song has spawned two sequels, a full-length album, some truly indescribable TV performances, and its own spotlight on the Dr. Demento show.

From what I've read, both of these hunting carols found national cult followings. Anecdotally, though, I've never spoken to someone who didn't grow up in the same area as I did who's even heard of these songs — and it's a question I ask more than anyone should. I'm glad for the alleged broader success of the assorted Yoopers and Bananas, but the Sconnie snob in me suspects that their carols are always going to hit different for those of us who grew up on their home turf. I can't vouch for whether the second week of deer camp truly is the greatest time of year, but I can say that it certainly has a singular soundtrack.

*Just because I can't imagine another scenario where I'll have an excuse to mention it, I'll note that neither of these songs is the most hyper-specific regional novelty song to get airplay on WCOW. That title belongs to "Sparta, Wisconsin," a brilliant late '70s folk-rock jam by Tommy Orrico, my hometown's resident artist/musician/raconteur. The nuances of its satire will be lost on anyone who hasn't spent significant time in Sparta, but trust me when I say it's both a loving tribute and a savage takedown, as well as a heck of a catchy tune.