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Heartbreaking and hardly human, the whistle is the thing in a select few great pop songs of the twentieth century. Chief among them in my mind: John Lennon’s ‘Jealous Guy’, or rather the cover version released as a tribute by Roxy Music in February 1981, two months after Lennon was shot dead in New York. In his original recording, from 1971, Lennon’s whistling occupies just one verse, repeating the main melody in a frankly rather weak and thin register – a break from the regretful but also faintly sinister tone (‘Look out, babe!’) of the sung verses and choruses. On the Roxy version, singer Bryan Ferry’s more luxuriant whistling is preceded by guitar and saxophone solos, lending equal musical weight to the whistle when it comes. Ferry then repeats the whistled verse at the song’s end, and it fades out as if he might carry on forever in wordless contrition.

Interviewed four decades later, Ferry said he did not have to work hard on the whistled sections of ‘Jealous Guy’, because he had developed his whistling as a boy, on his early-morning paper round. Here Ferry was invoking a key figure in the modern history of the ancient art of whistling. The whistling newsboy was a staple of early and mid-twentieth-century popular culture: an object of sentiment or irritation, a lesson in the use and misuse of public space, and a reminder that the whistler in the street has long been understood, or misconstrued, in terms of age, class and race.

The picturesque attitude to this cliché of the streetscape of a century ago might be embodied, for example, in this object for sale online: a ceramic model of a whistling newsboy, manufactured in Germany in 1925. Along with his trademark cap and satchel full of newspapers, there is inside him a sprung mechanism and tiny bellows that force air through his puckered lips. It’s a sentimentalized version of a figure also widely satirized or disparaged. In 1906 the American vaudeville artist Len Spencer released on Columbia Records a comic sketch titled ‘Con Clancy and the Whistling Newsboy’, in which he plays one half of a dialogue between two caricatured Irish immigrants on the street. The newsboy is playing a tin whistle, known outside Ireland as a ‘penny whistle’. Over three and a half minutes of crude tunes and even cruder mockery from Spencer, it becomes clear that whistling in the street is the preserve of the young, the poor and the exiled.

Trace the history of approval and (mostly) disapproval of street whistling back through the previous century and you will find such prejudices confirmed and expanded to include certain female whistlers. Charles Babbage is best known as the inventor of the Analytical Engine, mechanical precursor of today’s computers and thus of modern online communication and entertainment. Babbage was not keen on his contemporaries’ noisy music-making or vocal advertisements of their wares outside his windows. In his 1864 book The Life of a Philosopher, he wrote: ‘During the last ten years, the amount of street music has so greatly increased that it has now become a positive nuisance to a very considerable portion of the inhabitants of London.’ Inclidued in a list of the ‘instruments of torture’ that ought to be outlawed in the capital were brass bands, fiddles, bagpipes, drums, trumpets, harpsichords, whistles and ‘the human voice in various forms’. And among Babbage’s objectionable street whistlers were drunks and ‘ladies of doubtful virtue’.

Such was his curmudgeonly zeal that Babbage even tried to enlist to his clause Charles Dickens, whose novels are actually full of whistlers, industrious or idling, annoying too: in The Pickwick Papers, the cockney swell Sam Weller insists on whistling: an ‘exceeding ungenteel sound’ that horrifies the footman John Smauker. Of habits that were once general in the modern city – smoking, spitting, littering, dog fouling – whistling is perhaps unusual in that it was disapproved of for reasons other than health and hygiene: for what it said about the whistler’s character or background. In 1931, Time magazine ran a story about one Professor Charles Gray Shaw, of NYU, who had published in a university magazine a screed against public whistling. The whistlers, said Shaw, ‘are not trying to create music, but to release emotion. They are voicing their low mentality, and confessing their sense of defeat. … Whistling is an unmistakable sign of the moron.’ Though he claimed to be amused by the national press attention his opinions attracted, Shaw seemed adamant that no ‘great man’ was a whistler – not Einstein, Edison or Mussolini.

In most or even all of these historical examples, the paradox of the public whistler is this: he or she has learned a skill or an art which may be deliberately employed to delight or enrage listeners. But at the same time whistlers whistle despite themselves, as a kind of habit or tic – they are heedless, unconscious, out of control – and so inadvertently reveal their lack of class or culture, their poverty or questionable ethnic origins. But also in this confusion of intent and accident lies the attraction of the whistler: a cultivated insouciance or casually studied cool. This is the essence of an often-repeated line from Howard Hawks’s 1944 film of Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not. Lauren Bacall to Humphrey Bogart: ‘You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.’

Calculated and devil-may-care, whistling is at once a matter of application and detachment – a sound in which one gives oneself up: to the skill required, but also to a transcendent or animal force. ‘If a lion could speak, we would not understand him’, wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein, who as it happens was an extraordinarily accomplished whistler. Friends and academic colleagues reported that Wittgenstein could whistle forty songs by Schubert, and that when conversation turned to Beethoven, he could accurately reproduce the whole of the viola part from the third movement of the quartet under discussion. He once wrote: ‘My day passes between logic, whistling, going for walks, and being depressed.’ But also: that at the end of the First World War, as his regiment of the Austro-Hungarian army was retreating before the Italians, he was sitting on a gun carriage and whistling Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony: an expression in extremis of philosophical obliviousness, or perhaps of metaphysical protest.

History does not record whether Wittgenstein had heard ‘Whistle While You Work’ in 1937 when it featured in Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves – though the song’s wartime popularity in Britain means it it not implausible that he might have heard it later when the philosopher took up work as a hospital orderly. The relationship is vexed between whistling as cheering distraction from labour and whistling as protest against the conditions of labour, or the absence of work. In October 1936, in protest at unemployment and poverty, about 200 men marched from Jarrow in the North East of England all the way to London. They were marshalled by whistle at the head of the crowd, and accompanied by the sounds of marching bands and tin whistles.

To whistle as you walk in the city is to draw on all of this tradition and more, including the several whistled languages that still exist around the world and constitute a secret register, a kind of jargon (traditionally the language of outsiders and criminals) that may be employed to alienate or mystify an invading or authoritarian power. Public whistling is for sure an expression of individual joy, a rising above personal circumstance, a seduction via musically signalled carelessness. Or a calculated insult on the part of one pesky whistler. But it is also – as it was negatively for the hapless Babbage and Shaw – a collective affront to rules and decorum, an organized assertion that is at times even more eloquent for being voiced without words. Whistle while you walk and you join a choir of the sonically and linguistically and musically rebellious, a flock of unruly creatures that will not be regulated or silenced. 

Brian Dillon is an Irish writer based in London. His books include Affinities, Suppose a Sentence, Essayism and In the Dark Room. His writing has appeared in frieze, Art Review, the Guardian, London Review of Books, The New Yorker and New York Times. He has curated exhibitions for Tate and Hayward galleries.