Good Medicine and Good Music

Alice Morgan Person (1840-1913) was a colorful North Carolinian. Born wealthy and married well, she fell into hardship after the Civil War but remarkably overcame by selling patent medicine and playing and sharing her arrangements of folk tunes, leading one newspaper to call her 'perhaps the best known woman in the state'. Presented here is her complete and previously unpublished autobiography. In addition, her story is told through new research and first-hand accounts, and her place in the histories of American patent medicine and southern folk music are discussed from an ethnomusicological perspective.