Pinkney "Pink" Anderson (February 12, 1900 – October 12, 1974) was an American blues singer and guitarist.
Born in small South Carolina town of Laurens and moved with his family to Spartanburg, also in South Carolina, when he was very young. As a child Pink sang and danced on street corners for tips, learning the basics of guitar playing from a neighbour. He first went on the road at age fourteen and joined Dr. William R. Kerr of the Indian Remedy Company in 1914 to entertain the crowds.
In the early 1900’s, pitchmen such as this would travel from town to town with their Medicine shows. Performers were used to attract audiences to the tent, and the doctors would sell miraculous elixirs, to cure a whole range of ailments. As a result Anderson's repertoire was very broad to enable him to do anything that might draw a crowd. In the early days he only sang a little, mainly dancing and telling a few jokes, but in 1918 he learned guitar from Simmie Dooley, a blind singer from Georgia who had settled in the Spartanburg area.
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| Anderson & Simmie Dooley |
Simeon Dooley was a blues singer and guitar player who was born in Georgia, probably around 1900. As a young man he moved to Spartanville where he would spend the rest of his life. He performed on the streets of there both as a solo artist and with occasional partners until he eventually joined up with Pink Anderson. After teaching Anderson the guitar they played the streets, parties and picnics when Anderson wasn’t on the road in his other role as entertainer in the Indian Remedy Show. Dooley rarely accompanied Anderson with the medicine show as he hated travelling and Kerr was not prepared to afford Dooley the special attention a blind man required.
In April 1928, Dooley and Anderson were invited to record for Columbia in Atlanta, Georgia. They recorded four songs, all within the medicine show/songster tradition, two were released that year and two more the following year. Columbia wanted Pink to return to Atlanta in 1929 to record on his own but Pink refused to go without his partner and continued to play the Spartanburg area and tour with the medicine show until it closed in 1945. Dooley returned to the streets of Spartanville but he was forced to give up through ill health and he died in December 1960. Simmie Dooley may not have been an outstanding vocalist but contemporaries regarded him as one of the greatest country blues guitarists.
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| Anderson with Peg Leg Jackson |
Anderson was recorded by the folklorist Paul Clayton at the Virginia State Fair in May 1950. After the closure of the medicine show Anderson spent the next twelve years with 'Big Chief Thunderclouds Show' until health problems forced his retirement in 1957. During this period he also led a small guitar, washboard and harmonica trio with harp player Keg "Shorty" Bell and washboard player Charley "Chilly Willy'' Williams.
In 1961 the Bluesville label recorded three albums of unaccompanied performances by Anderson, documenting him in Spartanburg, South Carolina. The titles of the three records, Carolina Blues Man, Medicine Show Man, and Ballad & Folksinger, vol. 3, sum up Pink Anderson’s life well and are a large slice of the repertoire that he had performed during the previous 35 years.
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| Anderson and son |
He appeared in the 1963 film The Bluesmen. He reduced his activities in the late 1960s after a stroke. Attempts by the folklorist Peter B. Lowry to record Anderson in 1970 were not successful, although apparently he could occasionally summon up some of his past abilities. A final tour took place in the early 1970s with the aid of Roy Book Binder, one of his students, taking him to Boston and New York City.
Pink Anderson stayed active on a part-time basis up until the time of his death in October 1974 of a heart attack, at the age of 74. He is interred at Lincoln Memorial Gardens, in Spartanburg.
(edited from Wikipedia & The Blues Trail)