This clip is from a film by Tom Davenport. It's a portrait of Arthur "Peg Leg Sam" Jackson - a harmonica player, singer, and comedian who made his living "busking" on the street and touring southern towns. Between the Civil War and World War II, many such gifted and restless young black musicians found careers in the traveling patent-medicine shows, a favorite entertainment in the rural and small-town South. They sang and recited comic routines and danced to attract a crowd for the pitchman and his sales of wonder-cure "snake oil." Born for Hard Luck includes highlights from Peg Leg Sam's performance at a North Carolina county fair in 1972, the only film record of a live medicine show and material filmed near his home in South Carolina in 1975. It gives excerpts from his comic routines, a mock chanted sermon, "toasts," folktales, three "buck dances," and his brilliant harmonica playing and singing of "Reuben Train," "Greasy Greens," "Hand Me Down," "Who Left My Backdoor Running," and "Froggie Went A-Courting." You can stream the entire film at www.folkstreams.net or the DVD's available from Davenport Films. Check out the Folkstreams.net site for some great stuff on making the film and about Peg Leg Sam.

"You look at me, you look at a man that was born for hard luck. I was born on the thirteenth day, odd day, on Friday, on a bad luck day. To show you that I is in hard luck, if I go up the street walking fast, I run over something. I'm in such hard luck, if I go up there walking slow, something run over me. I'm in such hard luck, if I'm sitting down I'm in everybody's way. I'm in such hard luck, if it's raining down soup at this very minute, everybody'd be standing there with a spoon--why, I'd have a fork. Yes sir, I was born for hard luck!" - Peg Leg Sam

Here's a bit from folkstreams.net about Peg Leg Sam:

Arthur Jackson was born on a farm near Jonesville, S.C., in 1911, and grew up sharing a one-room log cabin with his parents and 5 brothers and sisters. His father worked him so hard as a child that he was glad when a rainy day came. "I went to a school when it rained, " he says. "Outside of that I always had something to do on the farm....If I'd a-stayed at home I wouldn't have known a thing, wouldn't have been able to do anything but plow a mule. Nothing from nothing leaves nothing. I did a lot of work in vain--sixteen hours in June, July, August, working from sun to sun. If you plow a mule all day and into the night, you feel just as tired when you get up as when you lay down. Plow all night too, dreaming."

At the age of 10 Jackson started running away from home. "Arthur would be out in the field plowing a mule, working in the hot sun," a neighbor recalls. "All of a sudden that mule's ears would prick up in the air, " and Arthur would stop to listen. Soon you would hear a freight train several miles away, coming in our direction. That'd be the end of his plowing. He'd leave the mule standing in the row and run off to catch that train. You might not see him again for months."

He hoboed into Canada and New England in the summers and toward California and Florida when the weather turned cold, doing odd jobs--digging potatoes in Maine, cutting cane in Florida, preaching in Maryland, working on a boat in the Caribbean, serving time in a reform school and on a Georgia prison farm, and intermittently settling down for brief flings at marriage. In 1930, hungry and half asleep from days of hoboing, he lost a leg when he fell from a freight train near Raleigh, N.C. "That's when I started playing the harp good, "he says,"--making something of it."
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