Mike Chasar, the subject of today’s Ramblin’ column in The Gazette, had a fun time collecting old scrapbooks for his award-winning dissertation about how poetry influenced Americans from 1880 to 1945. While I was able to cover a lot of what he wrote about in that column, there’s no way to everything from a 225-page scholarly paper. I was truly disappointed I couldn’t work the subject of his third chapter — Burma Shave signs — into the column because I truly love that icon of the American highway.
Here’s part of what Mike wrote about Burma Shave signs in the introduction to his dissertation:
“From the 1920s to the early 1960s, Burma-Shave’s jingles lined U.S. highways with the intention that the poems’ folksy puns and popular ballad forms combined with the material experience of reading at high-speed would properly direct consumer attention and participation toward the company’s product. As a history of the campaign shows, however, consumers increasingly responded to these appeals by focusing on the poetry—what Eagleton would call “language in all of its material density” (2)—of Burma-Shave’s advertising and not the product it was enlisted to sell: they wrote alternate rhymes, they played with the form, they found the gaps between the signs to be invitations to make their own meanings, they reveled in the pleasure of reading the sequences backwards, and they seized on these opportunities to read socially, collaboratively and out loud rather than simply capitulating to the commercial messages in solitude and silence.
“The Burma-Vita Company naturally tried to redirect this enthusiasm by hosting jingle-writing contests—which, like Between the Bookends and R Yuh Listenin’? received tens of thousands of submissions every year from “amateur” writers—and by publishing small anthologies or “jingle books” which it used as promotional items. However, the company’s increasing double identity as a producer of shaving cream and a producer and publisher of poems ultimately caused something of a corporate crisis, and in the midst of decreasing sales in the 1950s, company personnel began blaming not the increasing U.S. presence of television nor the advent of electric shavers for its dwindling market share, but the poems that had been pitching the company’s signature product. Indeed, in calling for more “prose” advertising to serve as “simple direct selling copy,” one member of the company’s Board of Directors in effect admitted that the nature of the poems, however commercial they at one point appeared to be, didn’t provide the “hard sell” experience the company needed to survive (Burma-Vita [1952] “Minutes”).”
Alas, I miss the old signs. And while you can find the Burma Shave Story on Wikipedia, you can also find it all over the Internet.
Does your husband/misbehave/grunt and grumble/rant and rave?/shoot the brute some/ Burma-Shave
Don’t take a curve/at 60 per/we hate to lose/ a customer/ Burma-Shave
