Tommy Scott, a country singer and songwriter who began his career in the 1930s as a member of one of the last traveling medicine shows and later became its leader, keeping it alive for more than five decades of one-night stands long after its dubious comedy and digestive cures became cultural relics, died on Sept. 30 in Toccoa, Ga. He was 96.

He died after being injured in a car accident on Aug. 10, said his daughter, Sandra Scott Whitworth, who spent much of her childhood touring with the show as the singer, bass player and acrobat known to audiences as Baby Sandra. His wife of 64 years, Frankie, performed as “the glamour girl and the comedian,” Mrs. Whitworth said.

Mr. Scott, who grew up on a farm in Eastanollee, Ga., was still a teenager when he joined a medicine show in the 1930s run by M. F. Chamberlain, known as Doc. Mr. Scott sang and played guitar and performed as a blackface minstrel (he later gave up the blackface), a ventriloquist and, of course, a pitchman, helping sell Mr. Chamberlain’s Herb-O-Lac laxative.

Mr. Chamberlain, who had started the show late in the 19th century, retired in the late 1930s and gave Mr. Scott control of both the show and the laxative. Other medicine shows were fading at the time, but Mr. Scott continued with his. He eventually set aside the Herb-O-Lac for a skin liniment he unapologetically called Snake Oil, but his most enduring commodity was his nostalgic pitch. In time, he renamed his show “ ‘Doc’ Scott’s Last Real Old Time Medicine Show.”