New from me on Medium: From Burma-Shave to Burma-Gram

It’s been 60 years since Burma-Shave rhyming ads last entertained and instructed drivers on U.S. highways, but their spirit lives on in a quirky Instagram account I discovered a couple of years ago. In my latest story for Medium, I write about Burma-Gram, which updates the “verse by the side of the road” concept with clever online messages for 21st-century readers.

A famous Burma-Shave rhyming ad: “Within this vale / of toil / and sin / your head grows bald / but not your chin/ Burma-Shave.” (Via Legends of America)

 

A recent Burma-Gram:

 

Read “Burma-Shave Is Dead. Long Live Burma-Shave,” and be sure to scroll down to the end, where I attempt my own Burma-style rhyme. Don’t forget to clap (up to 50 times per story!), and if you feel moved to join Medium, here’s my referral link.

*

Blog bonus #1: A 2012 article in Print magazine, “The motion-graphic ads of Burma-Shave, 1927-1963” (the URL calls it “morbid roadside ad poetry”).

Blog bonus #2: Post–Burma-Shave, but long before Burma-Gram, U.S. political campaigns borrowed the roadside-verse format for their own ends. In 2008, Poetry & Popular Culture blogger Mike Chasar wrote about some of those efforts in “Burma-Shave Politics.” 

Comments

[Duchesse]

Thanks for the Wayback Machine trip, Nancy! The other feature of Burma Shave is that the signs were built for recall. As a kid, I looked forward to the rise over the two-lane blacktop that revealed the first sign of my favourite sequence: Baby your skin/Keep it fitter/Or baby will get/Another sitter. As close as Burma Shave came to ribaldry.