Good For What Ails You: Music of the Medicine Shows 1926-1937 with 72-page booklet

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Earning Their White Stripes. "But what I'm listening to most of the time at present is an album called Good For What Ails You, which is an album of songs that people used to listen to at medicine shows all over the States. It's quite an interesting album and I think that people would be well advised to pick it up." Jack White - Sunday Mail (Australia) Dec 18, 2005 Five Stars. Groundbreaking. "Fans of Nick Tosches' Where Dead Voices Gather will lap up this extraordinary snapshot of an America that is still shrouded in shadow. Good For What Ails You supplants the Harry Smith collections by surveying the people's music of the day, some of which sounds like nothing you have heard before." Jon Savage - MOJO Dec 2005 Before motion pictures, before radio, before television, the traveling Medicine Shows brought entertainment to America! Flamboyant pitch doctors roamed the land, hawking their tonics, elixirs, and miracle cures, and with them came a host of singers, dancers, comedians, banjo pickers, blues shouters, jug blowers, string ticklers, and minstrel men. The shows died out by mid-20th century, but not before a handful of seasoned veterans left their musical legacy on phonograph records. Here are classic performances by such colorful names as Pink Anderson, Daddy Stovepipe, Gid Tanner, Blind Sammie, Bogus Ben Covington, Fiddlin' John Carson, Banjo Joe, Shorty Godwin, Beans Hambone, Emmett Miller & His Georgia Crackers, the Three Tobacco Tags, and many more! Two-CD Set / 48 Songs Digitally Remastered / Over 2 Hours of Music / Six-Panel Digipak with 72-page Full Color Booklet A Profusely Illustrated History of the Medicine Shows, many Rare Photographs and Firsthand Accounts never before published, plus full discography and song descriptions. A Sonic Tonic: One of the fall's more curious and enlightening CD sets comes from acclaimed reissue label Old Hat. -- Todd Martens - Billboard/Reuters Oct 15, 2005 Annual Critics' Poll of the year's best records. -- Top 20 Reissues of 2005 - No Depression Jan/Feb 2006 As academia continues to pry open American show business' minstrel past, Ails is a fascinating illustration of its musical appeal. -- Michaelangelo Matos - City Pages/Seattle Weekly Nov 30, 2005 Fans of Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music may well find that this one is even wilder. -- Steve Leggett - All Music Guide Nov 2005 Good For What Ails You is just amazing - expansive, odd, moving, confusing, glorious. -- Greil Marcus - author The Old, Weird America Oct 2005 Listening, one can almost smell the Kickapoo Indian Salve. Pitches may have been purest snake oil, but music still delights. -- Chris Morris - Hollywood Reporter/Reuters Dec 29, 2005 Rare tracks from the heyday of the snake oil vendors. Weird folk and blackface balladry for Harry Smith Anthology addict. -- Top 10 Reissue of the Year - MOJO Jan 2006 Interview / Spotlight on Marshall Wyatt It's a funny thing. As we embark further on our journey into the new century, we are just now starting to rediscover all the long-forgotten, wonderful things about the 20th. Whether it's bluegrass or early jazz, many music lovers have developed a growing fondness for the musical styles of yesteryear. The result has been a slow but growing interest in older recorded music, music trapped on 78 RPM records, just waiting to be unleashed by modern technology. Enter Marshall Wyatt. His Old Hat label seeks out obscure vintage tunes and releases them in compilation form on CD, opening up a world unknown to our time - taking us back to the basic roots of popular entertainment that still impact the contemporary world. So how does Wyatt go about giving this music new life? We ask him about his mission and the love he has for the music of long ago. Mark Hodges - Mish Mash Feb 2002