Pink Anderson

Pinkney "Pink" Anderson was a singer and blues musician--mainly guitar--who was born in Laurens, SC, in 1900. He spent much of his career performing in traveling medicine shows, doing old minstrel, folk and ragtime tunes and even performing early blues numbers. As a child he made money by dancing and singing in the streets of Spartanburg, not far from where he was born. Around 1915 he formed a team with Simmie Dooley and hooked up with the "Dr. W.R. Kerr Indian Remedy Company Medicine Show" and traveled throughout the South for several years, entertaining crowds with their singing and dancing while the good doctor hawked his "miracle" cure-all. The pair are known to have cut two records for Columbia Records in 1928, but as far as is known, those are the only recordings they ever made. In the late 1920s or early 1930s the pair broke up the act. Dooley left the "entertainment" business, but Anderson kept right on with traveling medicine shows up until the mid-'50s, when his declining health finally forced him to retire. In the 1960s, however, young fans of folk music "discovered" his music. He recorded a new album for Prestige Records, "Carolina Blues Man, Vol. 1", in the early 1960s and made an appearance in a documentary about blues music and musicians, The Blues (1962). British rock band Pink Floyd held him in high enough regard to use his first name as their own (their last name was in honor of bluesman Floyd Council).