Wizard Oil
Channel: Stephen Griffith
Date: 2020-04-12

Day 27 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series  (folksongindex.com)

Earlier than 1880 patent medicine men and their wagons were traveling. Kickapoo Indian Sagwa as a spring tonic and Kickapoo Snake Oil for rheumatism and neuralgia were bespoken and proclaimed by dancing and shouting Indians. The Wizard Oil remedies had their merits sung by slick-tongued comedians with banjos. Flaring gasoline lamps lighted their faces as the throngs surged about listening to the promises made to the sick, lame, sore. Harry E. Randall of San Diego, California, heard the Wizard Oil mountebanks in Illinois in the late 1870's, and the following is a text and air communicated through Neeta Marquis of Los Angeles, California.