Macon spawned Little Richard, Otis Redding — and the kazoo?

The easy-to-toot gizmo that buzzes out emissions that are part beehive and part music, has, down the ages, come to amuse and, soon enough, aggravate just about anyone within earshot.

An exhibit tracing its purported history is currently on display at a Macon museum. On March 28, at the city’s amphitheater, thousands of kazooing locals will try, for the third time, to set a world record for the largest kazoo ensemble. (The current record — and, yes, there is one — is 5,190 people, set in London in 2011.)

Macon’s place in music’s hall of fame is secure. The origin story of the kazoo, though, has some serious holes. There are no local records of Vest or Von Clegg. Nor are there patent papers for the African-inspired membranophones that cite Macon connections — or the men themselves.

It is, quite possibly, just a hummed-dinger of a yarn, first spread by Brits, then a New Yorker, before being loosely embraced by this Middle Georgia city. Not that the story might not hold some truth.

‘No sweetness in it’

The genesis of the legend appears to be a seven-paragraph article about Vest and Von Clegg published in 1951 by Melody Maker, a British music weekly.

The article, replete with cartoonish names, bore the byline “Parp Green” and was bereft of sources. It told how Von Clegg crafted a kazoo to Vest’s specifications and how the instrument was then “submitted to public exhibition in 1850 at their workshop premises in Shanty Town, Macon, Georgia. This epoch-making event passed unnoticed and the Kazoo might have rusted in obscurity to this day.”

But in 1852, the story went on, “Vest, still imbued with visionary fervor,” showed it at the state fair, where “Mr. Edward Bear, the eminent toy manufacturer, was so enthusiastic that he contracted to mass produce it under licence from Vest and Von Clegg — his only stipulation being that its name should be changed to ‘The Down-South Submarine,’ with subtle reference to its shape.”

Was it satire, a splash of attempted humor in an otherwise authoritative publication?

Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.

Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.

Boaz Frankel, a kazoo expert and collector, said the old article reads “like something out of the Onion,” though he stopped short of declaring it pure farce.

“I treat Alabama Vest as a Paul Bunyan-like figure,” said Frankel, a TV correspondent in Pittsburgh, who has curated the kazoo exhibit that is on display through April 1 at Macon’s Tubman African American Museum.

“While there’s no evidence of these folks in any archives or public record … it’s a story that has been told for 70 or 80 years,” he said. “And there is some truth to it in that kazoos were really prevalent in the South and especially in African American music, because maybe some of these folks couldn’t afford a saxophone, they couldn’t afford a trumpet, but they were really talented musical people and so they could have a kazoo, which could lend sort of a brass band sound.”

Frankel’s Tubman exhibit takes care to deem the kazoo’s Macon ties a “musical legend” and that it is “difficult to say exactly where the tall tale began.”

As much as any city loves to honk its own horn, odds are Macon would have honked away had the story been true — or even known.

In fact, the word “kazoo” doesn’t look to have appeared in a Macon newspaper until 1885, and when it did, it was a lighthearted dispatch from the Gulf Coast city of Mobile, which was reportedly facing invasion from a central Alabama kazoo band.

The write-up made fun of the kazoo’s “droning bag-pipe sound,” how “there is no sweetness in it” and how “it is a good thing with which to drive the cats away at night.”

“How, by playing upon it?”

“No, by throwing it at them.”

‘We can’t find anything’

The other day at Macon’s Washington Memorial Library, a reporter asked Muriel Jackson, who oversees the Genealogy & Historical Room, for help.

Jackson, a no-nonsense sort considered by many the foremost authority on this city’s past, made a beeline to a folder containing 1852 state fair documents.

“We’ve never found Alabama Vest,” Jackson said. “We have read through all the stuff about that fair and we can’t find anything.”

She, too, has searched census records and all forms of directories for Vest and his supposed cohort, Von Clegg.

“It’s like that story got made up and it’s taken off,” she said, adding that a clockmaker of any repute would have either advertised in the newspaper or had his name listed somewhere. “We should be able to find Thaddeus Von Clegg if nobody else.”

Jackson wondered if someone created the story, someone far away, “to give it traction maybe.”

“Every article I see,” she said, “most of them are in the Northern states.”

At the same time, there are reasons the name of Vest, a former slave, might be absent from local records or any papers linking him to kazoos. Maybe, said Jackson, “he didn’t want anybody to know he invented it — if he invented it.”

Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.

Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.

Over at the Tubman, Jeff Bruce, the director of exhibitions, also was quick to point out that the Vest-Von Clegg invention story “can’t be verified in any way.”

What makes the tale intriguing to him, at least in part, are the gray areas of truth.

“So many of the stories that we love and hold dear aren’t true in that objective sense. But we want them to be true,” he said. “It’s this African American inventor and this white clockmaker collaborating, it’s a feel-good wonderful story, and wouldn’t it be great if that’s actually what happened? We can’t prove that it happened, but it would be so cool if it was.”

There was but a passing mention of any instruments at all making an appearance at that 1852 state fair.

On Oct. 26, 1852, an account in the Macon Weekly Telegraph told of “a fine Band … (that) dispensed martial music.”

The only thing remotely resembling a reference to kazoos and their melodious tones came in the same summation.

It was an assessment of the fair’s livestock: “the grunts of giant porkers.”

‘Impossible to play well’

The first known local mention of Macon as the birthplace of the kazoo did not come until April 1977. It too came from afar.

The Macon News, the city’s afternoon paper at the time, cited items in the New York Times and Billboard magazine, along with a segment on the “CBS Evening News” from a few weeks prior: “Our city has been making headlines in New York, where … Macon (has been named) as the birthplace of the kazoo.”

Those stories from up North were part of promotion for an outlandish troupe of kazoo players. The musicians were led by a New Yorker named Barbara Dean Stewart, an accomplished classical flutist, who had herself unearthed the kazoo’s Macon origin story in Melody Maker.

The Macon News article, informed by Stewart’s knowledge of kazoo lore, repeated the purported Vest-Von Clegg collaboration. It noted how “although every place in the world has its own type of mirliton, what makes the kazoo American is the replaceable membrane.”

The article included an interview with Stewart — “who admits the kazoo is not an especially musical instrument and is impossible to play well” — and went on to note how for three years she had delved into kazooing lore and how “due to the Civil War many of the records were lost or destroyed.”

Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.

Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.

Stewart, who died in 2011, was a free spirit who, on a lark four decades prior, formed what was billed as a kazoo quartet — which for utmost goofiness featured five kazooists, who, as she told the Macon News back in 1977, “strive for mediocrity.” They went by the name Kazoophony, and made appearances on variety shows and late-night TV programs.

Stewart led a charge to make the kazoo America’s national instrument. She even sent a letter to the White House seeking backing from President Jimmy Carter. (He didn’t reply.) In 1983, she published a book, “The Complete How to Kazoo,” which included a history of the instrument and the sage playing instruction to “hum, don’t blow.”

Her daughter, Whitney Stewart, a college squash coach in upstate New York, described her on the phone recently as “a citizen historian and kazooist” who did a lot of research.

She also recalled how her mother, often wearing toe rings with her hair coiffed in side buns like Princess Leia in “Star Wars,” and her band of kazooists performed barefoot in tuxedos. They dubbed one of their pieces the “William to Hell Overture,” a playful twist on Gioachino Rossini’s “William Tell Overture.”

“She had fun with the whole thing. It was a spoof,” Whitney Stewart said. “They played all over the place. They were on every show you could name at one point.”

In spreading kazoo gospel, one of her mother’s favorite things to do was hand out kazoos to the parents of young children and to inform them of the best place to store the instrument: on top of a refrigerator, out of reach.

Barbara Stewart also was said to have once possessed the world’s smallest kazoo.

Its story, too, seems lost to time. Or so the legend goes, her daughter said. “It got swallowed.”