A friend from Cambridge, a great lap steel guitar player, put me onto Folkstreams.net which is a great film resource of mostly archive material on folk activities. Music is one of the main topics (but also arts, crafts, industries, social life, etc) and there’s some fascinating films from people like Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger and other revivalists. One film is about the legendary Peg Leg Pete who spent all his life travelling around, scratching a living in many ways, but also playing harmonica and singing as a busker and later in Medicine shows. This is what is said of him:

 Born Arthur Jackson in Jonesville, South Carolina, United States, to David Jackson, a farmer and native of Virginia, and Emma Jackson, Arthur was the fourth of six children. His fraternal great-grandmother, Racheal Williams, was born 1810 in Colonial Virginia, and was commonly referred to as a mulatto. She may have had a Caucasian mother or father, most likely, a Caucasian father, as this would have been typical for the time period.

Arthur taught himself to play harmonica as a small child but resented school, left home at the age of 12, and never stopped roving. He shined shoes, acted as a house boy, cooked on ships, hoboed, then made a living busking on street corners. Arthur lost his leg trying to hop a train but made a peg out of a fencepost, bound it to his stub with a leather belt and kept moving.

Arthur’s ability to play 2 harmonicas at once (while one went in and out of his mouth) made him an attraction and he went on to perform in patent-medicine shows. He could also play notes on his harmonica with his nose. Arthur went on to marry Theo S. Jackson, who was 18 years older than him, and the mother of Herbert Miller and Katherine Miller, both natives of Tennessee. Peg Leg Sam gave his last medicine-show performance in 1972 in North Carolina, but continued to appear at music festivals in his final years.

He died in Jonesville in October 1977, at the age of 65.