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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2015
Patent medicine shows became popular in the United States around the turn of the twentieth century by selling their products alongside free musical and theatrical entertainments. The “doctors” promised a range of cures, but usually mixed their remedies with alcohol or narcotics – using the promise of health to evade religious authorities and law enforcement, even in dry counties. Many talented black performers toured with medicine shows, including a number of artists later associated with the blues. I argue that the medicine show had a decisive impact on the blues by providing not simply training in performance, but also an impetus for the notorious suggestiveness of its lyric code. The blues borrows from the medicine show its lawless appeal to ailments uncategorized and ignored by socially sanctioned experts.
1 50 Cent, “In Da Club,” on 50 Cent, Get Rich or Die Tryin’ (CD) (Shady Records 0694935442, 2003).
2 The southern usage of “medicine” to refer to liquor grows out of this connection. Crusaders against the medicine show, including yellow journalists, Progressive bureaucrats, and temperance advocates, all advocated against this aspect of the patent medicine business. Medicine shows countered their attacks in a variety of ways. Many doctors pitched their patent medicines as remedies for alcoholism or liver conditions (see McNamara, Brooks, Step Right Up (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996), 30Google Scholar). The shows often borrowed bits from popular temperance plays like William Smith's The Drunkard: Or, the Fallen Saved (1844) and William Pratt's Ten Nights in a Barroom and What I Saw There (1854). Anderson, Ann, Snake Oil, Hustlers and Hambones: The American Medicine Show (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000), 95Google Scholar, points out that producers could thus “have it both ways: By staging temperance plays, they got ‘respectable’ patrons into the tent and then sold them alcoholic nostrums in between the acts. Alcohol, when used for medicinal purposes, was perfectly acceptable, even to temperance reformers.”
3 Ogren, Kathy J., The Jazz Revolution: Twenties America and the Meaning of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dinerstein, Joel, Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture between the World Wars (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003)Google Scholar. “Americanitis” was a term in circulation at the end of the nineteenth century that meant to capture the peculiar psychological drawbacks of industrial modernity which by then America had come to represent. Later critics of the blues have long turned to psychoanalysis thinking through blues lyrics. Garon, Paul, Blues and the Poetic Spirit (San Francisco: City Lights, 2001)Google Scholar, makes a convincing parallel between pre-World War II blues and surrealism. Lott, Eric, “Back Door Man: Howlin’ Wolf and the Sound of Jim Crow,” American Quarterly, 63, 3 (2011), 697–710CrossRefGoogle Scholar, offers a reading of Howlin’ Wolf that combines Freud and historical materialism.
4 Stearns, Marshall W., The Story of Jazz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 107Google Scholar.
5 The blues as a concept draws on a dizzying array of cultural and historical sources. In Stomping the Blues (New York: Da Capo, 1976), Albert Murray deftly weaves pre-twentieth-century connotations of the “blues” – drawn from humoral medicine and Anglo-American Puritanism (he cheekily quotes Thomas Jefferson, writing in 1810, “We have something of the blue devils at times” (ibid., 64)). The ambiguities of the concept allowed it to circulate through health discourse of the turn of the century. One of the most notorious quacks of the period, Abrams, Albert, The Blues: Its Causes and Cures (New York: E. B. Treat and Co., 1904), 15Google Scholar, argues that “an attack of the blues is nought else but an acute neurasthenia or an aperiodic exacerbation of chronic neurasthenia.” He sold machines and guides to percussing the nerves around the internal organs (where he concluded the blues originated) as treatment. The idea appeared in the mainstream press: Marden, Orison Swett, editor of Success magazine, speaks repeatedly of stamping out the “blues” in Everybody Ahead: Or, Getting the Most Out of Life (New York: Frank E. Morrison, 1916)Google Scholar. Ladies Home Journal recommended music as a home remedy for “the blues” without noting the origin of this concept in African American communities: “Music as medicine in the home [is] better than any system of mental therapeutics … in all nervous illness music is very potent as a sedative, and, strange to say, in cases of despondency and melancholia the minor chords are most effective and act as a tonic.” Quoted in Muir, Peter, The Long Lost Blues: Popular Blues in America 1850–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press 2009)Google Scholar, 99.
6 Harris, Neil, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981), 59–89Google Scholar.
7 Young, James Harvey, The Toadstool Millionaires: A Social History of Patent Medicines in America before Federal Regulation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), 97Google Scholar.
8 Quoted in McNamara, 106.
9 James Harvey Young, “Folk into Fake,” Western Folklore, 44, 3 (July 1985), 225–39.
10 Quoted in McNamara, 106.
11 Banks, Ann, First-Person America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), 196Google Scholar, original emphasis.
12 David Edstrom, “Medicine Men of the '80's,” Reader's Digest, June 1938, 71–78, 78.
13 Lott, Eric, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.
14 Lhamon, W. T. Jr., Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998)Google Scholar, 12.
15 Revisionist music history has begun to complicate racialist ethnomusicological readings of the blues. Miller, Karl Hagstrom, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 21Google Scholar, for instance, argues that the “folkloric paradigm” and the record industry racialized southern American popular music in distorting ways. Medicine shows also featured white “songsters” as well, thus acting as a shared point of origin for the blues and country music. The earliest field recordings tended to ignore the medicine show as a context for black music, based partly on bogus assumptions about prisons, plantations, and camp meetings as the most pure repositories of African American culture. For African American culture, alcoholism, and the temperance movement, see Herd, Denise A., “Prohibition, Racism, and Class Politics in the Post-Reconstruction South,” Journal of Drug Issues, 13,1 (Winter 1983), 77–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Cruz, Jon, “Booze and Blues: Alcohol and Black Popular Music, 1920–1930,” Contemporary Drug Problems, 15, 2 (Summer 1988), 149–85Google Scholar.
16 Mahar, William J., “Ethiopian Skits and Sketches: Contents and Contexts of Blackface Minstrelsy, 1840–1890,” in Bean, Annemarie, Hatch, James V., and McNamara, Brooks, eds., Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 179–222Google Scholar, 204.
17 Oliver, Paul, Blues Fell This Morning: Meaning in the Blues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 252Google Scholar.
18 Hurston, Zora Neale, Mules and Men (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990), 165Google Scholar.
19 Mbiti, John S., African Religions and Philosophy, 2nd edn (Portsmouth, NH, Heinemann, 1989), 165Google Scholar.
20 Long, Carolyn Morrow's Spiritual Merchants: Religion, Magic, and Commerce (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2001)Google Scholar is the definitive account of the transformation of African diasporic religious practice into American commodity subculture. Anderson also draws the parallel in her history of the medicine show (ibid., 97). Banks, First-Person America, 186–7, juxtaposes the lives of medicine show pitchmen with that of J. C. Julian, who sold “tobies” in Dust Bowl-era Oklahoma.
21 Hyatt, Harry Middleton, Hoodoo – Conjuration – Witchcraft – Rootwork, Volume II (Hannibal, MO: Western Publishing, 1970), 1106Google Scholar.
22 Ibid., 1100.
23 Ibid., 1101.
24 Long, 104.
25 Vivian Cameron, a master's student in Depression-era Chicago, wrote explicitly of the government forces that worked against traditional medicine in contemporary African American communities: “Their [root doctor's] hold must be very strong to allow them to maintain their ground in the face of such powerful interferences as the State Boards of Health, free dispensaries and free education. But the mould for the reception of these beliefs is set from babyhood in many families and the traditions surrounding these practitioners seem to still retain enormous force.” Vivian Cameron, “Folk Beliefs Pertaining to Health of the Southern Negro,” master's thesis, Northwestern University, 1930, 59.
26 Adams, Samuel Hopkins, “The Fraud above the Law,” Colliers, 49, 8 (11 May 1912), 13Google Scholar.
27 Baraka, Amiri, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: Quill, 1999), 82Google Scholar.
28 Anderson, Pink, Medicine Show Man (LP) (Prestige/Bluesville 1051, 1961)Google Scholar, liner notes.
29 McNamara, Step Right Up, 138–40.
30 Charters, Samuel, The Country Blues (New York: Da Capo, 1975Google Scholar; first published 1959), 103.
31 Ibid., 116.
32 Quoted in McNamara, 136.
33 Quoted in McKee, Margaret and Chisenhall, Fred, Beale Black and Blue: Life and Music on Black America's Main Street (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 196Google Scholar.
34 John Hurt, Mississippi, Avalon Blues: The Complete 1928 Okeh Recordings (CD) (Columbia/Legacy, 1996)Google Scholar, liner notes.
35 Handy, W. C., Father of the Blues: An Autobiography (New York: Da Capo, 1969), 33Google Scholar.
36 Oakley, Giles, The Devil's Music: A History of the Blues (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 153Google Scholar.
37 Cannon, Gus and Lewis, Noah, “Walk Right In,” Complete Recorded Works in Chronological Order, Vol. 2 (CD) (Document Records 5033, 1990)Google Scholar.
38 Gus Cannon, Walk Right In (CD) (Stax 702, 1999), my transcription.
39 Murray, Stomping the Blues, 16.
40 White, Newman Ivey, American Negro Folk-Songs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928)Google Scholar, 392. The earliest mention of the blues as a style of African American musical performance demonstrates its emergence from medicine show and vaudeville performance circuits. On 16 April 1910 the Indianapolis Freeman, a nationally distributed black newspaper, noted John W. F. “Johnnie” Woods's ventriloquist act in the Airdome Theater in Jacksonville, Florida: “This is the second week that Prof. Woods, the ventriloquist, with his little doll Henry. This week he set the Airdome wild by making little Henry drunk. Did you ever see a ventriloquist's figure get intoxicated? Well, it's rich; it's great; and Prof. Woods knows how to handle his figure. He uses the ‘blues' for little Henry in this drunken act. This boy is only twenty-two years old and has a bright future in front of him if he will only stick to it.” Woods toured with vaudeville and medicine show troupes in 1909, like the Plant Juice Medicine Company, with whom he worked as a “buck and wing dancer, female impersonator and ventriloquist.” The Freeman, 14 Aug. 1909, reported that his “little wooden-headed boy” sang “Trans-mag-ni-fi-can-bam-dam-u-ality.” For a detailed reading of blues in the Freeman, see Abbott, Lynn and Seroff, Doug, “‘They Cert'ly Sound Good to Me’: Sheet Music, Southern Vaudeville, and the Commercial Ascendancy of the Blues,” in Evans, David, ed., Ramblin’ on My Mind: New Perspectives on the Blues (Chicago: The University of Illinois Press, 2008), 49–104Google Scholar, 60–61.
41 With one important exception, Tommy Johnson's “Canned Heat Blues,” which refers to “Jake,” an alcoholic Jamaican ginger extract sold as a patent medicine. Calt, Stephen, Barrelhouse Words: A Blues Dialect Dictionary (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009)Google Scholar, 134.
42 Quoted in Miller, Segregating Sound, 75.
43 Sackheim, Eric, ed., The Blues Line (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1969)Google Scholar, 371.
44 Ibid., 370.
45 Ibid., 371, original emphasis.
46 Quoted in Oliver, Blues Fell This Morning, 130–31.
47 Ibid., 130.
48 Rowden, Terry, The Songs of Blind Folk: African American Musicians and the Cultures of Blindness (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 48–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar, speculates that blind musicians were drawn to medicine shows because of white doctors' mistreatment. McTell's biographer, Michael Gray, points out that McTell learned music in blind schools, which funneled African American blind people into music. He also guesses that McTell was on the John Robinson Circus Show, unable to find the “Robertson's sideshow” and “John Roberts' sideshow” that he refers to in later-life recorded interviews. Gray, Michael, Hand Me My Travelin’ Shoes: In Search of Blind Willie McTell (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2009)Google Scholar, 151. McTell made ends meet in the 1930s on medicine shows, marveling at “the finest 12-string guitarist of his generation, bar none, playing hokum songs for small-town audiences.” Ibid., 259. McTell recorded sparsely through the 1940s and 1950s until his death in 1959 – thus missing the blues and folk revival of the 1960s. Throughout this later period, he continued to play standards he learned in travelling in shows, and to include rags and traditional melodies into his own compositions.
49 McTell, Blind Willie, The Classic Years, 1927–1940 (CD) (JSP Records 7711, 2003)Google Scholar, my transcription.
50 Goines, Leonard, “The Blues as Black Therapy: A Thematic Study,” Black World, 23, 1 (Nov. 1973), 28–40, 36Google Scholar.
51 Palmer, Robert, Deep Blues (New York: Penguin, 1982)Google Scholar, 277.