Bubba, Bubber, and Brother

Bubba jokes are everywhere. Stories about Bubba abound. I often hear comedians, especially northern comedians making light of the name Bubba, but what I never hear is anyone acknowledging where the name Bubba comes from. Maybe everybody already knows this and just thinks it is not worth mentioning. But I don’t think that a lot of them do.

Where I come from, brothers especially older brothers are called Brother. My sister called me Brother. Since she called me Brother, so did my mom and dad. When I worked at my dad’s shop, he called me Brother, so everyone who came by the shop started calling me Brother. That was the only name they had ever heard me called, it was all they knew. One of the most embarrassing aspects of that whole thing was that I knew my wife’s father many years before I knew her. He met me at the shop and, just like everybody else, he called me Brother. Now talking about an awkward situation when your father-in-law calls you Brother. I suspect that would have elicited a lot of lodge pole pine family tree jokes. He quickly replaced Brother with Kenneth when I started dating his daughter and continued to call me Kenneth until his death.

My lady friend Linda calls her brother Ricky, Brother, but she also calls her oldest son Andy, Brother and her younger son John, Brother. Any time Linda starts a sentence off with the name Brother, I have to wait and see what context it is offered up in to determine who she is talking about. I say all this to make the point that Brother is a very common name in my part of the south. Now little babies when they first start to talk don’t pronounce Brother very well. The best of them usually manage something like Bubber. Others are more apt to settle on Bubba. Often the parents will correct them until they learn how to say Brother correctly. This is what my parents did. But many parents think that the mispronunciation is cute. It is a matter of taste. Whatever the case, these names stick. Just as I was Brother to a whole community until I was 24 years old, and just as Ricky, Andy and John are still Brother to Linda, so there are Bubbers and Bubbas through out the south. You don’t have to be a redneck to be called Bubba or Bubber, all you ready need is a younger sibling with average pronunciation skills and laid back parents.