Burma-Shave: The Road's Vernacular Poets

In nineteen twenty-five, a shaving cream company in Minneapolis was struggling to sell its product and had almost no advertising budget. A salesman named Allan Odell suggested putting signs on rural roads, a series of five or six signs spaced a few hundred feet apart, each carrying one line of a rhyming verse that culminated in a punch line and the brand name. His father agreed to try it.

The Burma-Shave sign campaign ran from nineteen twenty-six to nineteen sixty-three. At its peak, the company had approximately seven thousand sets of signs on American highways, including Route Sixty-Six. Travelers read them at driving speed, the signs appearing in sequence through the windshield, the rhyme building toward its finish line. The format depended entirely on the automobile and the road. You could not experience Burma-Shave on foot.

Some of the verses were just jokes. Some warned against drunk driving, decades before the federal highway safety campaigns. A few addressed reckless driving with a directness that government public service announcements of the period rarely matched. Several were politically pointed in ways that their corporate origin makes slightly surprising. They were genuinely funny. They were, in a precise structural sense, vernacular literature: poems that required a specific technology and a specific road to be read in the way they were intended.

When Philip Morris bought the Burma-Vita company in nineteen sixty-three and ended the campaign, drivers on Route Sixty-Six noticed the signs coming down. It was mourned in a way that shaving cream advertising would not normally be mourned. The signs had become part of what the road was.

A set of reproductions stands in Seligman today. They are not the same thing, but they remind you of the shape of the thing.