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Music Physicianers: Blues Lyric Form and the Patent Medicine Show
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2015
Abstract
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.
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References
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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.”
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