National Kazoo Day

Kazoo patent, 1902

Today is National Kazoo Day, when kazoo players celebrate the long history of the instrument in America.

No one knows the exact date of the kazoo’s invention. A popular story holds that it was designed in the 1840s by an African-American man named Alabama Vest.

German clockmaker Thaddeus Von Clegg constructed a prototype, which Vest introduced at the 1852 Georgia State Fair as the “Down-South Submarine.”

The closest we can get to verifying that account is to confirm that a state fair did occur in Macon, Georgia, in 1852.

The modern metal kazoo was patented by George D. Smith of Buffalo, New York, on May 27, 1902.

We don’t know why it wasn’t mass-produced until a dozen years later. The factory, which became known as the Original Kazoo Company, now operates a museum open to kazoo fans willing to make the pilgrimage to Eden, New York.

Down south? The Kazoo Museum in Beaufort, South Carolina, opened in 2007, and has a “collection of nearly two-hundred unique kazoo-related items.” It’s located in a kazoo factory on 12 John Galt Road, an address sure to delight Ayn Rand fans.

Budding kazooists should keep in mind that the kazoo is a membranophone, which modifies the player’s voice via a vibrating membrane. Players must hum, not blow, into the kazoo, varying pitch and volume to produce different sounds.

Because no advanced musical training is required, a player can become a virtuoso almost immediately. That fact may also be what keeps the kazoo from getting the respect it deserves.

Kazoo virtuoso Barbara Stewart founded the “Keep America Humming Campaign to Make the Kazoo the National Instrument” to change that. As she told kazooamerica.org:

“We have a national bird, a national song, and a national debt. Why not kazoo as a national instrument?”

Why not, indeed?

In 2007, she told CBS Sunday Morning:

“It is said that pigs might be able to learn how, if they could be persuaded to kazoo before they eat it.”

Shortly before she died in 2011, Ms. Stewart broke the Guinness World Record for Largest Kazoo Ensemble when she led an audience of 5,910 at the Royal Albert Hall in a rousing kazoo performance. We wish we could have been there to hear it, even though we imagine we would have needed an aspirin or three afterward.

Have a happy, headache-free National Kazoo Day!