'More Jingles Than It Could Use'

Older Americans will remember the Burma Shave signs along the sides of the country’s secondary roads, an entertaining artifact made extinct by the profusion of the Interstate system. The signs were spaced out along the berm. Read sequentially, they rhymed and constituted a sort of lineated doggerel, with the ultimate sign containing the name of the brushless shaving cream. For example: “Shaving brushes / You'll soon see ’em / On the shelf / In some / Museum / Burma-Shave.” 

On his 1977 album Foreign Affairs, Tom Waits titles a song “Burma Shave,” with rather cheesy Beat-style lyrics. Each verse, echoing the final sign, closes with the name of the shaving cream:

 

“Why don’t you have another swig, and pass that car if you’re so brave

I wanna get there ’fore the sun comes up in Burma-Shave.”

 

On this date, August 22, in 1953, Véra Nabokov submitted a jingle to the Burma-Vita Co., the shaving-cream manufacturer. Her husband was finishing Lolita, starting Pnin and collecting butterflies. She did the coast-to-coast driving while Nabokov concentrated on literature and Lepidoptera. His wife’s poem, with echoes of Waits' car-passing theme, is rhymed but doesn't close with “Burma Shave”:

 

“He passed two cars; then five; then seven;

And then he beat them all to Heaven.”

 

 Véra adds, “If you think you can use it, please send cheque to address given above.” Matthew J. Bruccoli, the editor of Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters 1940-1977 (1995), informs us that “the company replied that it had more jingles than it could use.”