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Discography / The W.S. Walcott Medicine Show

The W.S. Walcott Medicine Show

A raucous, horn-driven closer on Stage Fright, and one of the clearest windows into the world Levon Helm actually grew up in. The song's title is a lightly altered reference to F.S. Wolcott's Original Rabbit's Foot Minstrels, a real traveling variety show that toured the rural South through the early and mid-twentieth century, featuring Black blues singers, dancers, and performers, and that Helm remembered seeing come through Arkansas as a child. He changed the name slightly so it would scan better as a lyric.

Robertson wrote the song, built around a loose, rowdy arrangement that leans on John Simon's horn parts and a lyric that reads almost like a carnival barker's pitch, full of exaggerated claims and colorful hucksterism. It's one of the record's more purely fun tracks, a contrast to the anxious, introspective songs that dominate the rest of Stage Fright, and it became a natural closing number in concert for the same reason it closes the album: nothing else on the record sends an audience out the door in a better mood.

Notable versions