Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show – Sylvia’s Mother

Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show

Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show was an American pop, country and soft rock band, formed around Union City, New Jersey in 1967 as The Chocolate Papers. They enjoyed considerable commercial success in the 1970s with hit singles including “Sylvia’s Mother”, “The Cover of the Rolling Stone”, “A Little Bit More” and “When You’re in Love with a Beautiful Woman”. In addition to their own material, Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show performed songs written by the poet Shel Silverstein. Often later billed simply as Dr. Hook, they had eight years of regular chart hits, in both the U.S. and the UK, and greatest success with their later gentler material. The founding core of the band consisted of three friends George Cummings, Ray Sawyer and Billy Francis, who had played up and down the East Coast and into the Midwest, ending up in New Jersey. There they added future lead vocalist, Dennis Locorriere, and when told by a club owner that they needed a name to put on a poster in the window of his of his establishment, Cummings made a sign: “Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show: Tonic for the Soul” (prior to this Cummings, Sawyer, and Francis had performed as “The Chocolate Papers”). The name was inspired by the traveling medicine shows of the old West. To this day, Ray Sawyer is mistakenly considered Dr. Hook, because of the eyepatch he wears as the result of an almost fatal car crash in Oregon in 1967.

Sylvia’s Mother

Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show – Sylvia’s Mother