An old-time medicine show with quick wit and dazzling musicianship.

Hezekiah TSolve – 1

Hezekiah’s variety show takes its inspiration from the old-time medicine shows of the American West where quack “doctors” and their musical entertainers set up in front of the footlights to entertain with music, comedy, and wild sermonizing—all to sell patent “medicines” to their poor, rural audiences.

An evangelical-preacher-turned-Marxist-radical, Hezekiah’s show delivers all the entertainments of the medicine shows—fiddles, banjos, four-part harmonies, slapstick gags, and sales pitches.

This preacher’s dedication to working class politics and the revolution of the proletariat make his stage show into a blend between a Socialist political rally during the Great Depression and an old-fashioned country hoedown.

With such songs as “Jesus Was a Marxist”, Hezekiah and his four-piece band switch banjos, fiddles, sousaphone, harmonicas and guitars as they perform everything from ragtime to Appalachian fiddle tunes to gospel hymns from the Deep South.

The Complete Recordings of Hezekiah Procter is a live medicine show act, a dazzling display of virtuosity by Canada’s most revered old-time and folk musicians and a performance art piece that takes audiences back to the beginnings of country music.

A collaboration between Montreal songwriter Li’l Andy and folk festival darlings Sheesham and Lotus & ‘Son, The Complete Recordings of Hezekiah Procter sees Andy adopting the persona of “Hezekiah Procter” a long lost legend of old-time music. The group combines harmony vocals, fiddles, banjos, sousaphone and theatre to recreate the medicine show and vaudeville act of the fictional 1920s performer.

The album began as Andy writing old-time country songs as Hezekiah Procter, imagining the singer’s troubled life and legend through song. He then recruited the multi-instrumentalists of Sheesham and Lotus & ‘Son to record those songs on a “wire recorder” — an actual antique piece of recording equipment from the 1920s.

The double album they made together sounds like a new discovery of 78rpms records from the early days of country music. Included in that box-set is a novel written by Li’l Andy telling the imagined life story of Hezekiah Procter, a performer as talented and troubled as Hank Williams, Jimmie Rodgers or Robert Johnson.