Introducing Bob Burns — Arkansas Traveler (1936) 🇺🇸
He’s the comic for Bing Crosby and he’s radio’s newest best bet
by Dan Wheeler
“I’m going nuts,” Bob Burns (1890–1956) said. “I don’t know who I am, or why, or when I was born, or anything much I can’t answer your questions.”
Did you ever try to get a man to talk to you while he was getting ready to go to Washington, Philadelphia, and Hollywood — all, as far as I could make out, at practically the same time? Right after he’d signed a contract to appear on Bing Crosby’s Kraft Music Hall radio program? With the telephone ringing every two minutes by the clock? When, with the best will in the world, he couldn’t think long enough, or consecutively enough, to put half-a-dozen words together?
If you did, I guess you know why Bob Burns said he was going nuts — and why I thought I might go with him.
He looked wildly around the room. And suddenly he had an inspiration.
“Hey!” he said. He dashed over to a pile of papers and dug out a battered black book. “Look — here’s my scrap book. I’ve kept it ever since the war. There’s things in it I’ve forgotten. You can find out all about me from it.”
So that’s what I did, with Bob yelling answers to my questions about things I didn’t quite understand from across the room, the next room, and the bottoms of trunks. That’s how I learned the story of the man you first heard last summer on Rudy Vallee’s Variety Hour and whose homely, casual humor is now the comedy highlight of Bing Crosby’s Music Hall.
The first thing you find wandering through that scrap book is something called a bazooka. It turns up under a variety of different names, but it’s really always the same thing — just a bazooka. Right in front, pasted on the back of a picture of Bob in a clown suit (with bazooka), is a clipping from the New York Sun of October 10, 1920, headed “When Bazooka Struck Nevers.”
Bazooka seems to have struck Nevers pretty hard. Nevers, you know, is a town in northern France, and when the bazooka descended upon it, it had already had about all it could stand in the way of shocks, what with invading German armies, air raids, and Big Berthas. It must have been the last straw when, one dismal rainy night, the good people of Nevers first heard a noise best described as a cross between the whine of an approaching squadron of airplanes and the moan of an outraged banshee suffering from a bad cold in the head.
Hurried investigations were made, and the source of the racket turned out to be Gunnery Sergeant Robert Burns, U. S. Marines, sitting on the back of his neck in a small building next to the Theatre Republique, happily operating a contraption made of two pieces of gas pipe, some wire, and a tin funnel. One piece of pipe fitted into the other, sliding back and forth like a trombone. The funnel, as Bob explained later, was to give the bazooka tone — or timbre, as musicians say.
Relieved, the Neversites went back to bed, shaking their heads and muttering that they’d known all along one of those crazy Americans was at the bottom of the disturbance. But that night was a great one for Sergeant Burns. He’d been trying to build an instrument which would have more jazz in it than a trombone, and out-sax any saxophone, since he’d worked in a plumbing shop in Little Rock, Arkansas — and never, until that night in Nevers, had he had any luck. The bazooka, as he finally put it together, was just what he wanted — and if Nevers didn’t like it, that just showed Nevers’ lack of artistic appreciation.
Bob was born, as you can’t help knowing if you’ve heard him on the air, in Van Buren, Arkansas. The comedian in him came out early, in 1905, when he was head man of his high school entertainments, and in 1909, when he and his brother Farrar organized a two-man vaudeville act with which they toured the southern states.
After that, though, he decided there might be other professions in the world he’d like better. He returned to Arkansas and became a pilot on a river boat. For a while he worked in that Little Rock plumbing shop. Then, remembering that Horace Greeley had once said something pretty much to the point, Bob went out to Utah and worked on a ranch, riding herd on the cows. At this point the comedian in him broke out again, and we find him on the stage with a Salt Lake City stock company.
The next thing I knew, thumbing through the scrap book, he was in Chicago, working for the advertising department of a newspaper. “Hey!” I yelled, “what did you leave the Salt Lake stock company for?”
“They wanted me to play Uncle Tom.”
Bob had been moving around the country fairly fast, but while he was in Chicago the war caught up to him. It was a made-to-order event for anyone who liked excitement as much as he did, and he was at the recruiting office before you could take your hat off your head and get ready to drop it. He rather expected to take the next boat for France. Instead, they sent him to a training camp at Paris Island, which is in South Carolina, and put him to work teaching recruits how to fire their rifles.
A man can’t spend all his time teaching other men how to shoot. After a while, that gets very tiresome. So Bob organized the U. S. Marine Jazz Band, and that explains how he finally got to France. If it hadn’t been for the band, he’d probably have stayed in Paris Island until the Armistice. The scrap book doesn’t say whether the authorities thought they ought to get that band out of the United States or that it might make the boys in France so mad when they heard it, they’d go right out and lick every German in sight. At any rate, Bob and his fellow Marines-musicians sailed in the summer of 1918. In rest camps behind the lines, they put on shows and entertainments for the doughboys.
“But didn’t you ever get to the front?” I called to Bob. “Nope,” was his cheerful answer. “There must have been a front somewhere, but darned if I ever saw it.”
It was in the winter following the Armistice that the bazooka was born, and after that Bob was an international incident to be reckoned with. Bazooka’s first public appearance, if the scrap book is to be trusted, was at a concert given at the Grand Café de la Tranchée in Tours by the 205th M. P. It was the bazooka, all right, even if the program does call it a “buzuke.”
Then he took the thing touring with his jazz band, over most of Europe. The scrap book announces that he played it for the royalty of the “friendly nations” — and if they were still friendly when they had finished listening to the bazooka, they must have been amiable indeed.
Bazooka invaded the United States in the fall of 1920, when Bob brought it back and installed it and himself at the Bal Tabarin, a Broadway cabaret. A contemporary account assures us that when its first strains fell upon the ears of the Bal Tabarin’s patrons, ten waiters became conscience-stricken and returned to the patrons approximately $100 which they had short-changed them. Personally, I think that’s exaggerated. It was probably only $75.
After that there were several years in which Bob and his bazooka moved aimlessly around the country. Bazooka appears under a number of different names — “gazooka” in Los Angeles, “pazooka” in Chicago, and even “mazooka-boom” in South Carolina. It seems they’ll stand for anything in South Carolina.
In 1921, while he was playing in a jazz band in Atlantic City, Bob married Miss Elizabeth Fisher, of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. That’s what the scrap book said, and all it said.
“How about when you got married?” I called.
Bob paused in his frenzied rushes from telephone to trunks. “She ran an amusement stand on Young’s Pier,” he said, “and I fell in love with her the first time I saw her. But I couldn’t talk to her. I hadn’t ever been in love before, and I’d get all bottled up inside. One night, though, she came into the restaurant where I was playing, with a party of friends, and I played the old bazooka as sweet as I could. People told me afterwards they hadn’t realized a bazooka could make music like that. Well sir, it did the trick. She could tell from the way the bazooka sounded just how I felt about her, and by September she’d said she’d marry me. It was the bazooka that did it.” Maybe. Myself, I think it’s more likely that she took the only way she knew to stop him playing it at her.
From 1925 to 1928, Bob toured the country in vaudeville, as half of the blackface team of Burns and West. In 1930, he was in the vanguard of vaudeville performers who went to Hollywood when talking pictures were young. When you hear him now, you probably don’t realize you used to see him in the movies — among others, in Young As You Feel, with the late Will Rogers.
In Hollywood, he did radio work too. You West Coast listeners heard him as Soda Pop on the Gilmore Circus. But it may as well be admitted right now that neither in the movies nor radio was he the smash success he has since become. Bob’s gifts as a comedian can’t fight their way through prepared scripts. He’s at his best when he works spontaneously, without preparation, without a script, telling his stories about his home town and state as he thinks of them.
He returned to New York last year, discouraged after a long period during which work had been scanty and unsatisfactory. Then came a guest appearance for Rudy Vallee, followed, so immediate was his success, by another engagement for the same program — a contract with Paul Whiteman on the Music Hall — and finally his present contract with the same sponsor, now that Bing Crosby has taken the show over.
Or — no, that’s wrong. Not finally. Because if there’s one thing sure about this particular Arkansas traveler, it’s that he’ll keep on traveling, somewhere — and this time he’s going to be traveling to some pretty big places.
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Until you’ve heard his bazooka, you’ve never lived. The middle picture was taken back in the days of the war and shows the first one he invented. For Bob and his instrument of torture, with Bing Crosby on the Kraft Phenix Music Hall, turn to page 56, ten o’clock column.
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Collection: Radio Mirror Magazine, March 1936