[Dixielandjazz] Almost OKOM - review of "Good for What Ails You: Music of the Medicine Shows, 1926-1937" (Old Hat)

[David Richoux]

Found this today in the local free newspaper: http:// 
www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/11.23.05/medicine-0547.html

here is a snip:
> So it is with great excitement that now, years later and with no  
> further career designs on either magic or snake oil, I have  
> stumbled across an incredible, brand-new two-CD anthology called  
> Good for What Ails You: Music of the Medicine Shows, 1926-1937 (Old  
> Hat). It's all here, in the great recorded performances and the  
> heavily annotated booklet, everything appealing and fascinating  
> about the traveling medicine shows: the energetic vocalists,  
> obviously stage-honed, with their animated, forceful articulation  
> and inventive patter; the improvised tools of music making, hewn  
> from gas cans and handsaws; and, above all, the eagerness to please  
> and the simplicity with which it was done, often with a short song,  
> a good harmony and a bottleneck guitar.
>
> Well-known old-time performers with anthologies of their own, such  
> as Emmett Miller, the Memphis Sheiks and Uncle Dave Macon, are  
> represented here alongside well-named nobodies, whose exotic noms  
> de guerre alone can thrill: Beans Hambone! Peg Leg Sam! And, of  
> course, Stovepipe No. 1, named after his homemade kitchen  
> instrument and presumably numbered to distinguish himself from  
> Daddy Stovepipe, also featured here.

Dave Richoux