This is Ozarks at Large. I'm Matthew Moore. We're here to talk more Ozarks history. I'm joined by Jared Phillips. Jared, welcome back.
Jared Phillips: Hey, great to be here on a rainy day.
Matthew Moore: We are here to talk about a topic that, when you and I very first started this segment, I asked you what are some things we can look forward to hearing more about, and you told me about bazookas. And I thought, I can't wait to get to that. We're here today to talk about bazookas. And what's interesting is that when you said bazooka and when I thought bazooka, we weren't talking about the same thing.
Phillips: No, we were not talking about the same thing at all. Most people, I think, when you say bazooka, they think about an old John Wayne movie or whatever that they watched with their grandparents — a World War II movie with a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher. That's what most people think about, right? But if you're from Arkansas, if you're from the Ozarks, especially the western side of the Ozarks, I hope you think about a guy named Bob Burns and his bazooka. And so that's what I want to talk about — Bob Burns and hillbillies a little bit today.
Moore: Let's get into it.
Phillips: So Bob Burns was from Van Buren. He's actually born in Greenwood, and then when he was young, he moved to Van Buren. He grew up in Van Buren, and he was kind of a hometown comedian. He'll eventually become very well known as a radio and movie actor by the '30s and '40s. But around 1905, he starts to tinker with different random plumbing supplies. He'd been playing in some neighborhood bands and this kind of thing. He starts fiddling around — he had a comedic bent — and he hooks together some pieces of pipe and a whiskey funnel and some other things that we still don't really know. It's a little bit of a mystery. And he creates what he called the bazooka, which somebody described once as a combination of a trombone and a slide whistle that sounds like a moose that's crying. And if you hear a recording of it, you kind of see what it sounds like. He kind of fiddles around with it, becomes relatively proficient at his novel creation, ends up being a part of various string bands and brass bands around the region. And then by World War I, he is actually traveling around and playing with the American Expeditionary Force by 1917 and 1918, as part of the troop entertainment. And he begins to get this reputation as this kind of the Arkansas, easygoing, happy-go-lucky hillbilly with this really weird instrument. He makes everybody laugh.
Moore: Almost like a precursor to the USO. One of the things Kyle points out is there's a bit of a difference between how Arkansans and Ozarkers took to his poking fun at people from Arkansas compared to, say, Lum and Abner. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Phillips: Yeah. What Bob Burns will do is he kind of becomes famous as a sideman for a while in the '20s and '30s. This is when the crystallization of the nation's understanding of hillbillies is kind of happening, and the Ozarks are part of that conversation. What Bob Burns does is he helps to contribute to what I call — and other scholars have called this — the development of the ignorant comedic hillbilly. When you listen to him tell stories in his radio show, which he becomes kind of the most famous for — the Arkansas Traveler, which aired from 1941 until 1947 and was based off a character from a movie he was in around 1938 — he's kind of just telling stories about his comedic, lovable but not necessarily intelligent neighbors in Van Buren and elsewhere. And he becomes a part of this Ozark hillbilly shtick. Whether or not he's consciously trying to contribute to this conversation is a different question, but whether he was or not, he helps to solidify in the minds of America that hillbillies are a particular thing. We are funny, we're ignorant, and we're funny because we're ignorant. But we're always there to have a good time, because he's not mean-spirited. He's not that violent hillbilly kind of idea that we see emerge out of Appalachia. He's here for a good time. Kind of like the old George Strait song.
Moore: I love it. So let's talk about how we go from this musical instrument being the original bazooka to it being adopted as a military term.
Phillips: Really, it has to do with some of these radio performances. After he comes home from Europe in World War I, he moves out to the West Coast and starts getting these bit parts on various radio shows. At one point he's starring alongside Bing Crosby in movies, when Bing Crosby's career is beginning to take off. He's being compared to Will Rogers at this point, in the early '30s, as his career is taking off. He seems like a sort of an Arkansas or hillbilly answer to Will Rogers in this kind of down-home Midwestern humor. His movie career takes off, and he starts, you know, in a lot of these almost-A movies like The Arkansas Traveler and others. He just becomes a almost a lingua franca of humor, of just kind of regular humor. And this is really important, especially when you think about the context of the '30s and the '40s. This is the Great Depression. When FDR comes into office in 1932, the United States is heading into 25% unemployment, the banking system is collapsing. People need things to laugh at, and the world — we can hear the rumblings of war in Europe. People are trying to figure out how to hang on to anything right now. And humorists like Burns — and there are countless others across the country doing similar things — they offer a way for Americans to hold on to a measure of hope in a really trying time. And because of the radio, by the time we get to World War II, radio was such a ubiquitous thing in the American household. TV was not a big deal. Going to the movies was a big event and kind of expensive, but everybody had access to a radio. And he was on everybody's radio program, and he gets his own radio program by 1941. By the time soldiers start to get drafted and they're getting mustered out with their equipment and with the rocket launcher, everybody starts to say, this thing looks like that Bob Burns prop — because it's in all of his movies and always in his radio show. And so everybody just associates the bazooka as this kind of long-looking thing that looks like it could shoot something off your shoulder with Bob Burns, and the name just sticks.
Moore: Wow. And it's wild — it's almost taken on a life of its own. For generations after that, the etymology of the term is probably lost to many.
Phillips: Yeah, I think so. And in part it's because Burns kind of disappears from public eye really quickly. 1947, his radio show will end, and he had become relatively wealthy thanks to some really smart real estate investments in California. And he just said, you know what, I'm done. He used to joke that he got pretty tired working 30 minutes a week. And then in 1956, he ultimately died from illness. So he kind of disappears, like a lot of those '30s and '40s almost flash-in-the-pan stars — but they leave these quiet impressions on us. We kind of lose him from popular memory, which is similar to a lot of other Ozark influences on the nation's pop culture. A lot of people forget — and we can go into greater detail some other day — about the influence of Springfield, Missouri, on the development of the country music scene. In a way, we have Nashville because of Springfield. But that's often forgotten.
Moore: When we think about the legacy of Bob Burns, we think legacy of the bazooka. When you talk about it in your class setting, what does that look like?
Phillips: It really goes back to that comedic idea. When I talk about people like Burns in my history class, I really highlight this idea that the Ozarks hang on to the comedic hillbilly. We're funny, we're safe. And it helps to explain in part why we have the kind of hillbilly tourism that we have here — because we have a different kind of hillbilly tourism here than you might see in Appalachia. We don't have the legacy of things like Deliverance, for example. It's easier for people to associate the Ozarks with a kinder, gentler hillbilly. Because we have Bob Burns, and not long after that we're going to have the hillbilly TV shows — the country TV shows, key of which is The Beverly Hillbillies, which is following very much in the same mold that Burns is putting out there. And even Lum and Abner is still a part of this kind of ecosystem that's developing around here. And it would kind of culminate, I guess, in something like Dogpatch, which is in a constant state of flux. But Silver Dollar City would be the king of these examples today.
Moore: This has been a really great conversation. What can we expect coming down the road?
Phillips: We're coming into the spring growing season, and one of the things I thought I might do is talk about a little bit of personal research I'm working on — the development of organic agriculture in the Ozarks. As we walk into spring, we could talk about some of the roots of things like Ozark Natural Foods.
Moore: I love it. Jared, thank you as always for your time.
Phillips: No problem.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
