| abstract |
During the years immediately following the Civil War, patent medicine became a national industry. These formulas typically contained a range of vegetable compounds mixed with alcohol or narcotics. Between 1900 and 1950, patent medicine companies staged traveling medicine show entertainments across the southern United States tailored to local and regional interests, centering Black vernacular performers who played traditional string music, recastings of songs from the minstrel stage, and the emergent form of the country blues. Performances of the blues by Black male performers attracted interest from Black and white rural audiences in the Central Piedmont, the small towns of Mississippi and Tennessee in the Mid-South, and Greater Texas. These performances overtly and implicitly rehearsed racialized notions of pain tolerance, intoxication, and addiction in Jim Crow America.
Reconstitutions of the repertoire of medicine shows and their formal musical elements are scarce and have not accounted for their geographic or therapeutic context. My study offers a close reading of songs I trace to the medicine show stage with attention to them as musical and theatrical texts. This repertoire both validated and challenged local anxieties among whites about Black American political, social, and cultural power after Emancipation. My analysis benefits from Jacques Derrida's critical theorization of the pharmakon as both remedy and poison. Medicine show performances positioned Black bluesmen as magnetic individuals, capable of superhuman feats but simultaneously as alarming and dangerous presences. Like the pharmakon itself, the Black bluesman embodied both harm and healing. These performances, staged in many cases to provide further justification to locals for curbing the rights of Black Americans, were upended by the dynamic and therapeutic presentations of Black vernacular musicians, vivid in their mapping of strategies to survive illness, injury, a lack of basic resources, and racialized violence in the first years of the twentieth century. Portraits of the medicine show musicians Pink Anderson, Gus Cannon, Arthur Jackson, Willie McTell, and Esther Mae Scott suggest that Black vernacular musicians influenced consumer spending by modeling a course of action emphatic in its endorsement of self-soothing, self-medication, and empowerment.
|
