After a one-semester term as a Southern Baptist ministerial student at Union University in his hometown of Jackson, Tennessee, he began a musical career as a drummer and occasional vocalist.
[3] Then, it seemed, changing public tastes (i.e., the falling out-of-favor of 'beatnik'-style comedy), coupled with Gardner's holding onto his same performing style, resulted in a similar fading of his recording career.
During his brief time as a star among America's socially-aware stand-up comedians of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Brother Dave successfully fused a stream-of-consciousness style of addressing subjects (e.g., Lord Buckley, Jean Shepherd) with a classic Southern 'storyteller/liars'-bench[definition needed]' manner (e.g., Andy Griffith, and the later Justin Wilson and Jerry Clower), setting himself apart a bit from Northern Jewish contemporaries such as Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, and Shelley Berman.
He had succeeded in getting Baylor to book Brother Dave because Gardner's uncle was a pastor who had developed the Sunday evening "Training Union" program then widely used in Southern Baptist churches.
Hunt moved Brother Dave and wife Millie to Dallas, because of Gardner's proclivity to be a staunch conservative,[citation needed] and to not be afraid to "tell it like it was."
[citation needed] Gardner mixed thought-provoking or confounding stand-alone one-liners, or 'zingers' (e.g., "An' I'm writin' a new book an' it's gonna be called "What Will the Preachers Do When the Devil is Saved?
Brother Dave got a good deal of comic mileage from his boosting of all things Southern, making him a latter-day version of Kenny Delmar's "Senator Claghorn" on Fred Allen's classic radio show.
Anticipating the bottled-water market by almost 30 years, he remarked that, at Hot Springs, Arkansas, he had seen "some o' them ignorant, stupid Southerners sellin' water to them brilliant Yankees."
Although Gardner's early-1960s albums for RCA Victor contained questionable racial humor,[citation needed] there is nothing like the overtly racist content of his late-1960s act.
The following September, he was on a movie set near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, working on an Earl Owensby film called Chain Gang,[5] when he had a much bigger heart attack.