I just read a biography of the ill-fated Hank Williams. In the last year of his life, he was a headliner on "the last, greatest medicine show", something called the Hadacol Caravan.

Hadacol was an allegedly medicinal product which was developed and marketed by a Lousiana hustler and sometime gubernatorial candidate named Dudley Leblanc. In 1952 it was the second-most heavily advertised product in the U.S., after Coca Cola. Leblanc told a friend once, when asked what was actually in it, "enough alcohol to make you feel good (12%) and enough laxative to give ya a good bowel movement." The alcohol was key: the stuff was a hot seller in the numerous dry counties and towns of the South.

The significance of Hadacol is not the vile stuff itself, but how it was marketed. The Hadacol Caravan was a huge traveling country music revue featuring Hank and other major country stars of the era. Admission to a show was two Hadacol labels per person. Leblanc took the show to places where Hadacol wasn't distributed, and the drugstores would suddenly get hundreds of requests for it.

At peak they were spending a million dollars per month on advertising, but selling a million per day of product. It didn't last, of course. The whole scheme crashed and burned as the AMA and the Food and Drug Administration took an interest in Hadacol, and the Caravan suddenly had no money to pay its big-ticket performers or Hadacol's many creditors. (Hank himself was dead a few months later.)

Leblanc had been using the Caravan as a funding & public exposure springboard to run for Governor of Lousiana again. Didn't work out so well for him, thus Lousiana was deprived of having this colourful character as its leader...

W-O