Album Notes

Sideshow Stephen has been around. He’s been playing allover the place in pubs and clubs, on blockparties, county fairs, cattle auctions and whatnot, participating in all kinds of shindiggery, jamborezation and hootenannery imaginable. On one of those fairs (or was it a cattle market?) He met Prof. “Freewheelin’” Ray Gunn for the first time. It was down in the swamps. This guy just turned up outta the fog, murmured something along the lines that he was a drummer, and that he would be able to give Sideshow Stephens songs that “rhythm, what’s able to heal...” So forces were joined to form the Turpentine Treacle Traveling Medicine Show, aiming to deliver solid entertainment to their audiences, with the convenient side effect of healing all ailments known to man and beast alike.

Those guys medicine is a strange mix of howling blues, wailing country tunes and merry folksongs, accompanied by Sideshow Stephens slide guitar, mouth organ or mandolin, with a voice on top that will make you believe what you hear, the whole thing driven by the healing rhythms of the Professor from the swamps. Original Tunes by Sideshow Stephen are combined with cover songs, which were of some notoriety for the last time in the first half of the 20th century, although even then they would have been considered somewhat obscure. Their repertoire is of a timelessness that stands in relieving contrast to the overkill of trendiness and zeitgeist so dominant in other modern day acts. The Turpentine Treacle Traveling Medicine Show do not aim to “rock the house”, but to “heal what ails ya”.