(Video Above: Rick & Bubba enter The Exchange)
Yellowhammer News CEO Cliff Sims sat down with the self-proclaimed “two sexiest fat men alive,” Rick Burgess and Bill “Bubba” Bussey, to see what makes the Alabama-based, nationally syndicated talk radio giants tick.
Rick & Bubba’s on-air partnership is over two decades old, but Bubba still remembers how it all started at a small station in Gadsden, Alabama.
“We were needing a morning show guy and I suggested they get Rick, my old college buddy… So I went and tried to get Rick and we couldn’t get him because he wanted too much money, and that’s kind of a thing I like about Rick now,” Bubba laughed. “But it really was a God thing.”
Rick & Bubba are well-known for their down-home, southern style, but Sims asked the two if there was ever a time when they had trouble getting on air because they don’t sound like typical morning talk show hosts.
“Bubba was the part owner of a radio station and the staff threatened to leave if Bubba kept recording commercials,” Rick joked.
“Yea, I didn’t get to do anything. I couldn’t get on the air,” Bubba added. “So when I see them now I give them a little ‘howdy do.'”
Rick & Bubba’s real-life friendship has been a significant factor in their on-air success, even in the midst of adversity. Rick’s 2-year-old son tragically drowned in 2008. Rick explained in The Exchange that it was a profound moment in the history of the show.
The Rick & Bubba Show had experienced so much success to that point that it could have been easy for some people to dismiss all the talk about their faith as “easy.” “Of course you believe in God,” they could say, “look what all you’ve been given.” With the death of Rick’s son, Rick said it was an opportunity to show the world that they truly believed what they said they believed. But it wasn’t easy.
“I remember trying to go back on the air the first day, and for the first time in my entire life, I didn’t feel like I could do it,” Rick recalled. “I couldn’t imagine going back on the air and trying to do something that would be kind of meaningless — some little silly something… And I remember telling God, ‘I can’t do it.’ And that’s when God said, ‘Well, now you’re ready. You’ve never had to depend on Me for this before, and now you’re so weak you can’t even tie your shoes to get ready for work. Your problem never was that you weren’t strong enough. Your problem was that you weren’t weak enough. And now do the show the way I want it done.'”
Rick & Bubba have also gotten more active in politics in recent years. They hosted one of the country’s first Tea Party rallies back in 2009, and have publicly endorsed several candidates in Alabama during this election cycle.
“For the first time in my life, I really believe this country is headed to be a socialistic, soft tyranny, gigantic central government society,” Rick said. “And I look at my children… And I look at the society they may face, and I think, I’ve been given a platform, I’ve been given a voice. And I really have struggled with, as a Christian, where do we really belong in all of this? And I was driving along one day and I was listening to the voice of Adrian Rogers, and he said, ‘I’ve had people ask me, ‘should Christians be involved in elections and changing policy in a free society?’ And he said, ‘my reaction to them is, ‘How could you be a Christian and not be involved?’ … We’re at a point now where we’ve got to quit running the same old people.”
While most of The Exchange with Rick & Bubba looked back at the last 20 years they’ve been on the air, at the end, Sims asked them to look ahead 20 years and sum up in a nutshell the legacy they hope to some day leave behind.
“If we’ve gone 20 years on the air, and we’ve had no eternal impact for the Kingdom of God — nobody has evaluated themselves, as we are called to do; no one has come to the Gospel, as we are called to do; if no one has been made disciples like we’re told to do — if we have not done those things, then this has been a monumental waste of time,” Rick said.
Bubba agreed, but also added, “I hope that people have laughed when they didn’t have anything to laugh about — when they were headed to surgery, when they were headed to a funeral, when they had things not going good in their life, they’d been laid off — that they swung by the radio and got a laugh over something that’s totally ridiculous.”
Check out the full, must-watch interview in the video above.
Interested in past episodes of The Exchange? Click over to Yellowhammer TV.
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