Along with ads for Lorman's full range of medicines, the songster included a cast list introducing an "ever welcome Vocalist and Organist," a "celebrated Comedian and End Man," the "Funniest End-Man in the business in his Funny Sayings, Banjo Solos, and popular Songs of the Day," and the medicine-wagon driver, "admired for his dexterity in handling the Ribbons on the Golden Chariot."
[4] As these shows declined, and listening to recorded music and dancing in juke joints and honky tonks became more popular, so the older songster style became less fashionable.
Songsters often sang composed songs or traditional ballads, frequently about legendary heroes or characters such as "Frankie and Johnny" and "Stagger Lee".
Blues singers, in contrast, tended to invent their own lyrics (or recycle those of others) and develop their own tunes and guitar (or sometimes piano) playing styles, singing of their own lives and shared emotional experiences.
There is a growing view among scholars[5] that the distinction made by experts such as Alan Lomax between "deep" blues singers and "songsters" is an artificial one, and that in fact most of the leading archetypal blues artists, including Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, performed a wide variety of music in public, but recorded only that proportion of their material which was seen by their producers as original or innovative.