Talkin’ For-Profit Medicine Blues
A century of hard living and hospital bills in American song.
![](https://images.jacobinmag.com/2018/02/12113657/issue28-dep-c.jpg)
`Illustrations by James Clapham`
It’s a perennial truth, well known to laborers, wanderers, and blues singers: the road of hardship winds inevitably through hospitals. The hospital ballad is a staple of American roots music, native to landscapes as remote as the Mississippi Delta and the Oklahoma plain. That’s not a surprise in a country where so many of our […]