Did you know the kazoo came from Macon?

Editor’s note: The following story is part of a feature called Home Grown in which we take a look at the people and products that have made a name for themselves well beyond our Middle Georgia borders.

The kazoo, according to the Kazoo Museum in Beaufort, South Carolina, may well have been developed in Macon as a descendent of an African instrument known as the mirliton or onion flute. The more modern instrument is credited as being the handiwork of a black man from Macon whose name was Alabama Vest.

Vest, according to the museum’s website, and a Georgia clockmaker named Thaddeus von Clegg made the first kazoo in the 1840s “and introduced it to the world at the 1852 Georgia State Fair. The kazoo was a success from the start and was soon being sold across the region as the Down South Submarine.”

Newspaper archives here from the mid-19th century don’t appear to include any mention of the instrument’s origin, though they do note the fair. An 1885 article in The Telegraph does, however, refer to the kazoo as “a new nondescript musical instrument of torture.”

This story was originally published November 11, 2016 at 4:00 PM with the headline "Did you know the kazoo came from Macon?."