Working the Medicine Show
Working the medicine shows with
Chief Thundercloud.
When Jackson first began to work in medicine shows, they were a
popular form of entertainment in the small-town South. A
"doctor" with a supply of wonder soap, snake-oil liniment, and
tonics would hire musicians and comics (generally 5 to 10 of
them) to drum up crowds at tobacco auctions and county fairs.
Sometimes they even "dragged the streets"--collected a crowd
with their playing-- and led the people to the show, where
music, comic routines, and dancing alternated with the sales
pitch.
By the late 1950s, when Peg and Chief Thundercloud began to
travel regularly together, medicine shows were fast disappearing
from the scene, and theirs was much shrunk from those of earlier
days. The Chief himself had once run a troupe composed of 3 or 4
head comedians, 2 straight men, 2 dancers, 2 blues singers, and
a band with 6 or 7 musicians. But the chief and Peg now traveled
with at the most only one other man, a guitarist like Pink
Anderson. Only the two of them were performing when a sound
recording and a videotape were made of their show in Pittsboro,
N.C., in 1972.
Knowing the schedule of the fairs, Peg and the Chief traveled
from one to the next in a station wagon loaded with products for
sale. At each new town they routinely got the permission of the
police chief and fair superintendent and set up at a strategic
location within the fairgrounds, keeping a discreet distance
from the midway, but close to the path leading to it from the
entrance. Their stage--a wooden platform little larger than a
card table--was attached to the rear of the station wagon. A
large tilted beach umbrella surmounted it. Lighting came from a
string of bulbs overhead. In performing, they used a neck
microphone and a rather uncooperative amplification system.
Peg's preparations included wetting his harmonica in a glass of
water and his throat with mint gin. After dark, as the people
began drifting by, he mounted the stage and began his act with a
long and brilliant performance of "John Henry" guaranteed to
draw a crowd. This led into a comic routine with the Chief.
Eventually Chief Thundercloud hauled out a tattered but
ferocious-looking stuffed rattlesnake and began his sales pitch
for bottles of "Prairie King Liniment, " a rosy fluid concocted
of turpentine, the oils of mustard, cloves and eucalyptus, pine
oil, methyl salicylate, and kerosene. During the sales, the
Chief handed bottles one at a time to Peg, who carried them into
the crowd, swapping them for the dollar bills of the customers,
singing out "So-o-o-ld, CHIEF!" at each sale. When the crowd
would buy no more, Thundercloud packed away the remaining
bottles, and Peg would go off behind some of the tents to be
treated to drinks by his admirers.
The entire evening's performance--which lasted about 2 hours--
had a set structure. The men gave 2 shows, each with a different
pack of songs and jokes and each stint followed by the sale of
new products, such as "corn medicine" or "that famous,
old-fashioned Indian vegetable compound" guaranteed to "loosen
all the dirt, the grease, the grime, the filth and the
corruption." Peg seemed to unify each of his routines by
punctuating it with a different refrain: "Funny things happen in
this world!" or "Made me so mad I could eat fried chicken!" or
"Yes, I was BORN for hard luck!" Each act featured Peg in some
bravura performance, such as his "John Henry" or "Fox Chase" or
-- the climax of the evening--his dance imitating the convulsive
flapping of an old "Dominicker" hen just killed for frying. This
dance had several times been promised during the evening, and
repeatedly called for by the audiences.
Library of Congress
1935 Oct. Shahn,
Ben, 1898-1969, photographer (b&w film dup. neg.)
MSM-1 Man buying
bottle from person in Headdress LC-USF33- 006166-M1