Brother Dave Gardner
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David Gardner (June 11, 1926 - September 22, 1983), known as Brother Dave Gardner, was a U.S. comedian and singer.
A Tennessee native, Gardner studied drumming beginning at age 13. After a one-semester term as a Southern Baptist ministerial student at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee, he began a musical career as a drummer and occasional vocalist. After a pair of 'demo' singles for Decca Records around 1956, he had a 1958 Top-20 hit on OJ Records with "White Silver Sands."
It was his comedy routines between songs, however, that brought him to the attention of RCA Records artist & producer Chet Atkins. The eventual result was a comedy album with a couple of songs on it, Rejoice Dear Hearts! (1959), which propelled Gardner into the national eye, along with the first of several appearances on national television talk/variety shows such as The Tonight Show.
An arrest for marijuana possession in 1962 ended his visibility on television; then, it seemed, changing public tastes (i.e., 'beatnik'-style comedy falling out of favor), coupled with Gardner's holding onto his same performing style, resulted in a similar fading of his recording career. After 6 albums for RCA Victor Records, he made 2 for Capitol Records, and then others for lesser labels. He had another legal problem over tax-evasion charges in the 1970's, which his son helped clear up.
He had a role as a Southern preacher in the 1978 made-for-TV film Big Bob Johnson's Fantastic Speed Circus. He was cast in a B-level movie, and was just beginning work on it, at the time of his death.
He was twice married; his first wife, Millie, preceded him in death, and he was married to his second wife, Judy, at the time of his death. He had two children from his first marriage--son Dave II (deceased, 1999) and daughter Candace.
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[edit] Gardner's Comic Style
During his brief time as a superstar among the U.S.A.'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 (e.g., Lord Buckley, Jean Shepherd) with a classic Southern-American 'storyteller/liars'-bench' manner (e.g., Andy Griffith, and the later Justin Wilson and Jerry Clower), setting himself apart a bit from contemporaries such as Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, and Shelley Berman.
Gardner mixed one-liner stand-alone 'zingers' (e.g., "What will the Preachers do when the Devil is saved??"; "Gratitude is riches, and complaint is poverty, and the worst I ever had was wonderful!"; "Let them that don't want none, have memories of not gettin' any...let that not be their punishment but their reward.") 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 (U.S. state).
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. [ 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."
While Gardner did spin routines based on a wide-ranging social freedom, some of his material did show the racial stereotypes of his time. Often, he had any African-American characters in his routines speak with an exaggerated, high-pitched, Butterfly McQueen-style accent, as in "The Motorcycle Story." In another routine, he depicted an African-American woman as saying to a fellow of her race, "James Lewis, git away from that wheelbarrow -- say, you know you doesn't know nothin' 'bout machinery!"
Gardner's use of the term "ol' boy" has indicated to some people not familiar with the southern idiom that the person referred to was a black man. In his story entitled "Rejoice, Dear Hearts!" an "ol' boy" who "drove for the governor" ruined the car on the first day because he didn't understand the letters used on the automatic transmission. ("Well, we was both goin' about 80 and he tried to pass me, so I dropped it into race!") "Ol boy" then and now among Southerners often refers to a usually harmless, not-too-smart, ill-educated, well-meaning young to middle-aged man -- generally white -- who is the object of a tale, generally humorous. It's not to be confused with the demeaning "boy" that in years past was used by many Southern whites to refer to a black male. However, while Gardner's early 1960's albums for RCA Victor contained questionable racial humor, there is nothing like the overt racist content of his late-60's act.
[edit] Rediscovery?
After being out of the national limelight for many years, Brother Dave's contributions to American humor may see a comeback, due to the 2004 one-man play prepared and acted by David Anthony Wright, Rejoice Dear Hearts: An Evening With Brother Dave Gardner.
In addition, Gardner's first four albums have been reissued on the Laugh.com label, and his routines can occasionally be heard on Sirius satellite radio channels Blue Collar 103 and Laugh Break 105.
[edit] Selected Discography:
- Rejoice Dear Hearts! (RCA Victor, 1959)
- Kick Thy Own Self (RCA Victor, 1960)
- Ain't That Weird? (RCA Victor, 1961)
- Did You Ever? (RCA Victor, 1962)
- All Seriousness Aside (RCA Victor, 1963)
- It's Bigger Than Both Of Us (RCA Victor, 1963)
- It Don't Make No Difference (Capitol, 1964)
- It's All In How You Look At "It" (Capitol, 1965?)
- Hip-Ocrasy (Tower/Capitol, 1968)
