David A. Windham thumbnail

Greasy Medlin

I found these photos while browsing a directory of scans of old slides on one of my drives. That’s me on the bottom left… the little one looking not too thrilled about the whole clown thing. The only information I had on it was the date written on the box and the other slides from the same box. It was dated as May 1975. The other photos show some sort of music event which appears to have happened in Columbia, South Carolina.  Regardless to say, I started a deep dive on them and ended up learning quite a bit about early American traveling medicine shows.  The first is Julian Leonard ‘Greasy’ Medlin with the clown face. That’s DeWitt ‘Snuffy’ Jenkins with the cap and banjo behind him on stage who played alongside of Homer ‘Pappy’ Sherrill on the fiddle.  ‘Snuffy’ and ‘Pappy’ have Wikipedia pages1,2 so I started a draft for ‘Greasy’ which got me to researching for resources. One of the first resources I found is a video of my uncle introducing Snuffy playing Beaumont Rag on the washboard for a television program in 19743.

Snuffy and Pappy started playing together in the late 1930s as the Hillbillies and changed their name to The Hired Hands around 1950. Greasy played in the Aristocratic Pigs in the 30s and joined the Hired Hands in the 40s.  The majority of this was documented by Pat Ahrens in the book Carolina Bluegrass: A High Lonesome History4.  Greasy also worked as a country and western sideman for Hank Williams5 ,was possibly Cherokee Indian, and is featured in the film Free Show Tonight the Last of the Medicine Show by Academy award winning filmmaker Paul Wagner and folklorist Steve Zeitlin. It’s narrated by Roy Acuff6 and available online7. One of the last medicine show practitioners, Peg Leg Sam8, was also from South Carolina. A documentary that was made about him that was featured in the film Amelie9. Other early performers from South Carolina like the Reverend Gary Davis10, Pinky Anderson11, Drink Small12, and Joshua White13 also had close ties to early American traveling medicine shows and revivals.

Traveling medicine shows began in the Dark Ages after Rome was sacked and when the Roman Catholic church succeeded in banning circuses and theatre in 568 AD. Many authors cite Tabarin14, an early Parisian street Charlatan as inspiration. Tabarin became and eponym for any street performer and the origins of Minstrel Shows, Charlatans, Blackface, Burlesques, Cabaret, and Vaudeville can be traced similarly. P.T. Barnum’s Menagerie, Caravan & Hippodrome15 was obviously inspired. The Ziegfeld Follies16 alongside of almost all of the most famous early American entertainers like Buster Keaton, Jack Benny, Milton Berle, Abbot and Costello, the Marx Brothers, Red Skelton, Fred Astaire, Pearl Bailey, W.C. Fields, Mae West, Will Rodgers, Josephine Baker, Bob Hope, and Harry Houdini.  I don’t think I’ll ever see Burl Ives the same way now that I know he travelled as a vagabond musician during the 30’s playing banjo and used the song The Wayfaring Stranger17 as the title of his 40’s radio show popularizing traditional folk songs.

Another aspect of the early American traveling medicine shows that I find interesting is the ‘medicine’ pitch and how that too has had a very lasting impact on our culture. The elixirs and tonics peddled between the entertainment seldom treated illness but instead relied on the pleasurable effects of alcohol, opium, and cocaine. By 1900, the patent medicine industry was an $80 million dollar business.  Coca-Cola was based on Vin Mariani and originally called Pemberton’s French Wine Cola by a morphine addict who had suffered a sword injury in the civil war.18  It was only made non-alcoholic after the temperance movement. Asa Griggs Candler, who bought and marketing the recipe, father had served in the of South Carolina Legislature. One of the last traveling medicine shows was organized by Louisiana state Senator Dudley LeBlanc for his patent medicine Hadacol19. The Hadacol Caravan featured many of the early vaudeville celebrities, blues, and country musicians. There is a small part of me that really likes the circus tradition and I think I’d be best suited as a pitch man for the medicine. I’ve contemplated my own brand of tonics in the past like opening a micro-distillery. I also recently learned that Groucho Marx once owned the largest apple orchard in America in South Carolina20 and have considered the idea of making and marketing an infused cider using the iconic ‘Groucho glasses”21. 

“That’s the way a carnival man is. He don’t give them anything, yet he gives them something– entertainment, experience, or amusement for the chicken feed he takes away from them at his rack or wheel or ring board. And if he has a run of “mud-luck,” he always finds a way to get out somehow, raise a stake, and climb back into the game. You don’t see any genuine old-time carnival birds working the street for a dime, or picking up crumbs from a kitchen back door. They’re independent; and even if they’re down to the last two bits, you’d never know it by looking at them, or hear it from their own lips. They might do a lot of cussing in private, but never a hard-luck story to outsiders. They’ve always got some kind of idea tucked back in their head that they can pull out and turn into ham-and-egg money somehow.”

– interview by Earl Bowmand of the Federal Writers Project, New York City22

Snuffy, Pappy, and Greasy recorded two albums on the Rounder label. Crazy Water Barn Dance was published in 76 and it took me a bit to figure out where the title came.  At the age of 13, Greasy joined Dr. H.E. Foxworth’s Medicine Show to travel. Foxworth was from Dallas, TX and the Crazy Water Crystals Company23 was just right outside of Dallas in Mineral Wells. That company was known during the great depression to sponsor many ‘hillbilly’ music programs. Crazy Water Crystals claimed to aid in the treatment of a variety of disorders resulting from ‘faulty elimination’. The company had sponsored them to play across the country until the FDA cracked down on their advertising claims in the which lead to their decline.  They were long time sponsors of same titled radio program on WBT in Charlotte in the 30s where Snuffy got his start. 

Take a close look at what’s going on today with whatever is being peddled by various other ‘info’ or ‘enter’-tainers and you can spot the similarities. Everything is essentially something pitched alongside of some form of entertainment to make you feel better, sleep better, look better, ad infinitum. If you want a quick skit on the travelling medicine show, the Paul McCartney and Micheal Jackson 1983 music video for Say Say Say24 is an homage to it. Jackson must have enjoyed it enough to purchase the property on which it was filmed to convert it to the Neverland Ranch. This deep dive on Greasy as turned into a lesson on how much our current advertising, entertainment, and even pharmaceutical businesses were inspired by the traditions of the early American traveling medicine show.  

So I’ve got a wikipedia draft started for Julian ‘Greasy’ Medlin for perpetuity. Snuffy sold cars for a while in Columbia during the late 60s, died in 1990, and there is now a NC music festival in his honor. Greasy died in Columbia, SC in 1982. I looked up the Lexington address listed in Greasy’s obituary25 and it’s now a McDonalds. In a way, isn’t a clown pitching fried potatoes and cola-cola more of a medicine show than we might ever acknowledge.  

Here’s a playlist I made while writing this post:
  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snuffy_Jenkins
  2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pappy_Sherrill
  3. Picken Time WIS-TV https://www.knowitall.org/video/beaumont-rag-digital-traditions
  4. Carolina Bluegrass: A High Lonesome History –https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/Products/9781467118248
  5. Greasy Meadlin – https://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=63180
  6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Acuff
  7. Free Show Tonight – https://www.folkstreams.net/films/free-show-tonite
  8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peg_Leg_Sam
  9. https://www.folkstreams.net/films/born-for-hard-luck
  10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverend_Gary_Davis
  11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_Anderson
  12. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drink_Small
  13. Joshua White – https://davidawindham.com/joshua-white/
  14. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabarin
  15. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._T._Barnum
  16. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ziegfeld_Follies
  17. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wayfaring_Stranger_(song)
  18. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola
  19. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadacol
  20. Horseshoe Lake Farms – https://visitoconeesc.com/long-creek-place-to-visit/
  21. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groucho_glasses
  22. First Person America – https://books.google.com/books?id=yUXgCgAAQBAJ
  23. Crazy Water Crystals – https://drinkcrazywater.com/cw/crazy-water-history/
  24. Say Say Say – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLEhh_XpJ-0
  25. Greasy Medlin obituary- https://www.findagrave.com/photos/2013/24/23638441_135915345659.jpg