FP Series #251 - Brother Dave Gardner Traditional Cache

During his brief time as a superstar among the country's socially-aware stand-up comedians of the late 1950's and early 1960's, he successfully fused a 'stream-of-consciousness' style of addressing subjects with a classic Southern-American 'storyteller/liars'-bench' manner.

Gardner mixed one-liner stand-alone zingers with satirical musings on his contemporary political scene, and also told traditional Southern comedy stories. Most notable among these were "The Motorcycle Story;" "When John Gets Here" (also called "The Haunted House"); and, his version of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar as set in Rome, Georgia.

Gardner got a good deal of comic "mileage" from his boosting of all things Southern, making him a sort of latter-day version of Kenny Delmar's "Senator Claghorn" character on Fred Allen's classic radio show. He smoked cigarettes throughout his routines, bragging of them as being "a Southern product." He spoke of a Southerner's culinary fondness for "a Moon pie and an R.C. Cola". Anticipating the bottled-water market by almost 30 years, he noted that, at Hot Springs, Arkansas, he had seen the so-called "stupid, ignorant Southerners sellin' water to them brilliant Yankees." He said that the difference between a Northern Baptist and a Southern Baptist was that the Northern one said, "There ain't no Hell," and the Southern one said, "The hell there ain't."

To this day, I have no idea how I came into possession of Brother Dave's album Rejoice Dear Hearts back in the early 60's. But I had it and I listened to it over and over again, so much so, that I could pretty much conduct his entire routine word for word. And today I still find myself singing some of the songs from it.