Ben Pitts playing guitar, seated, portrait, photograph

Photograph caption: "Son of a 49er and singer of minstrel songs."
Sidney Robertson Cowell notes on verso of copy of photograph in Music Division, Library of Congress: "The 'come-on' man sings 'Calomel.' This is the 19th century rural American form of the singing commercial. Ben Pitts is recording for the Library of Congress the repetoire of his one-time career with itinerant medicine shows. Calomel was the best-known purgative of its day."
Forms part of a group of field materials documenting Ben Pitts and Leonard W. Jones performing Anglo-American music on October 3, 1939, collected by Sidney Robertson Cowell in Pine Grove, El Dorato County, California.