Recently the conversation at our house turned to medicine shows (this kind of conversational turn happens a lot around here). As a result, I dug out Good for What Ails You: Music of the Medicine Shows, 1926−1937, from Old Hat Records—a bonanza of eccentric, beyond-category music from the old, weird America. The accompanying 72-page booklet comprises a history of the traveling medicine show, interviews with show veterans, and useful annotations for each track. As The Wire put it, “Factor in assorted skillet lickers, jug stompers, fruit jar drinkers, ramblers, crackers, tarheels and tobacco tags, and you have a buried history of vernacular music, therapeutic culture and politics second to none.
Not only is this set a mother lode of blues, old timey, and
uncategorizable roots music, it can serve to clue You in on even more great
stuff. For example, Swing, You Cats by Hezekiah Jenkins led me to The
Panic Is On, his unblinking
ode to the Great Depression. Even the booklet can lead you to a whole new
world. Its discussion of Hadacol, “a Vitamin-B tonic laced with alcohol”
developed and sold by former Louisiana senator Dudley J. LeBlanc, character
right out of “O Brother, Where Art Thou,” led me to a raft of tunes like Hadacol
Boogie, Everybody Loves That Hadacol, and Hadacol Bounce, all
of which seem to focus more on the tonic’s second ingredient than the first.
Check out this 2004 version of Hadacol Boogie by Jerry Lee Lewis and Buddy
Guy!
The Lewis/Guy performance is a latter-day example of the musical
interaction across racial lines among medicine shows and their audiences that
included hillbilly blues and jug band music as well as mainstream pop tunes and
minstrel ditties reworked by Black songsters. Note; Some of these recordings
include racially offensive terms used by both Black and White performers. The annotations
point these terms and attitudes out, but excluding such recordings would sugarcoat
thew way things were (and are).
If you have any interest in American music, its history, or
the sheer exuberant entertainment value of this stuff, you owe it to yourself
to pick up this set. The
Old Hat website also has sound samples aplenty. As Bob Dylan said about Good
for What Ails You, “I got nothing against downloads and MP3s, but getting
this CD with all the pictures and liner notes,
well, it’s not as good as having it on the big 12” record, but at least there’s
a booklet there, and believe it or not, folks, you can even read it in a power
failure- as long as it’s daytime.”
To give you a feel for this amazing conglomeration, here’s
my current obsession—the Allen Brothers, a hillbilly jug band wailing the tar
out of Bow Wow Blues:
And a Memphis blues classic from Frank Stokes:
