From “Hard Travellin’
– The Hobo and his History” by Kenneth Allsop (from
the Chapter “Sex and the Single Man”):
The seasoned jocker or wolf, as the homosexual hobo with a lad in tow was, and still is, called, developed a Pied Piper art. It may be disconcerting to those accustomed to hear that apparent nonsense song The Big Rock Candy Mountains played on Children's Favorites radio programmes, to learn that this is a homosexual tramp serenade or at least a parody of what are known as the "ghost stories" the accomplished seducer spins to entice a child away with him on the next train out. For general consumption the verse has been changed:
One sunny day in the month of May
A jocker he come hiking,
He come to
a tree and "Ah!" says he,
"This is just to my liking."
In the very same month on the very same day
A hoosier's
son came hiking.
Said the bum to the son, "O, will you come
To the Big Rock Candy
Mountains?"
Then follows the lip-wetting catalogue of what the hoosier kid will be introduced to under the jocker's protection and guidance: hand-outs that grow on bushes, empty boxcars, cigarette trees, whisky springs, lakes of stew, a land of eternal sunshine where the cops have wooden legs, the bulldogs rubber teeth, the hens lay soft-boiled eggs, and where "they boiled in oil the inventor of toil."
The jungle version continues, less equivocally:
The punk rolled up his big blue eyes
And said to
the jocker,
"Sandy,
I've hiked and
hiked and wandered, too,
But I ain't seen any candy.
I've hiked and hiked till my feet are sore
I'll be God-damned if I’ll hike any more…"
Or, he adds, be carnally used in the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
The hyperbole itself is not all that immoderate when set against the prose in which the West promoted itself to prospective settlers, and indeed The Big Rock Candy Mountains may have started out as a parody within a parody. "Sunshine and green salads all the year will promote cheerfulness. Where there are not bitter winds, no sleet or hail"; "It is so healthy we had to shoot a man in order to start a graveyard"; "Where there are no aristocrats and people do not have to work hard to have plenty and go in the best society, where ten acres, judiciously planted in fruits, will soon make one independent, all varieties being wonderfully successful and profitable" - these are actual Big Rock Candy Mountain phrases with which the states advertised themselves.
There
are a good many variations of the tramp's Cockaigne, perhaps
the next best known being The Sweet Potato Mountains, about a floater who
settles down among the cigarette vines and ham 'n' egg trees, where whiteline springs squirt booze to your knees. Less well
known outside the jungle circuit but which speaks more candidly of the turn up
for many young boys is The Road Kid's Song:
Oh, when I was a little boy I started for the
West
I hadn't got no farther than Cheyenne,
When I met
a husky burly taking of his rest
And he flagged me with a big lump and a can
When I saw that can of coffee how it made me think
of home
"Won't you let me have some," said I, "Good
Mr. Bum?
Remember you was once a kid
yourself."
He asked me how old I was, I told him just fourteen,
That Muncie was where I come from.
In his eyes appeared a stare.
"I think you I will snare,
For you ought to have the makings of
a bum."
Harry "Mac" McClintock, one of the early song buskers for the IWW and who played the clarinet in the first Wobbly street band and edited the first edition of "The Little Red Songbook," claimed to be the author of not only Hallelujah, I'm a Bum but also the original The Big Rock Candy Mountains. McClintock had himself been a road kid. He ran away from his Knoxville, Tennessee, home at fourteen to join a circus. When the Gentry Brothers' Dog and Pony Show played its last date of the 1896 season at Anniston, Alabama, about half the fifty canvasmen and razorbacks collected their payoff and grabbed the first rattler out of town.
"I traveled alone," he says. "I was only a kid and looked even younger than I was. So the brakemen and the coppers in the towns ignored me and let me go my way unmolested:' He found that instead of being "a moocher of pokeouts at back doors" he could collect pocketfuls of coins in Bourbon Street in New Orleans by singing in the grog shops and can joints where a table of sailors was provided with glasses and a gallon tin of beer for two bits.
But he also found that his success as a troubador made him a prize catch for the type of hobo who would indubitably have been a pop group's agent in other times and circumstances.
"Most
of the vagrants were mechanics or laborers, uprooted and set adrift by hard
times and they were decent men. But there were others, 'blowed-in-the-glass-stiffs:
who boasted that they had never worked and never would, who soaked themselves
in booze when they could get it and who were always out to snare a kid to do
their begging and pander to their perversions.
"The luckless punk who fell into the clutches of one of these gents was treated with unbelievable brutality, and I wanted no part of such a life. As a 'producer' I was a shining mark; a kid who could not only beg handouts but who could bring in money for alcohol was a valuable piece of property for any jocker who could snare him.
"The decent hoboes were protective as long as they were around, but there were times when I fought like a wildcat or ran like a deer to preserve my independence and my virginity. I whittled my way out of two or three jams with a big Barlow knife, and on one occasion I jumped into the darkness from a boxcar door - from a train that must have been doing better than thirty miles an hour."
Hallelulia, On The Bum (as it originally was) became widely popular, the anthem of the Wobblies and a set-piece anywhere for migrant workers, but The Big Rock Candy Mountains on the other hand remained for a long time significant to only a limited and specialized audience. McClintock obviously wrote this out of keen inside knowledge of the jacker's methods and spiel.
Alan Lomax shrewdly draws connecting threads between The Big Rock Candy Mountains and Oleana, a satirical ballad still sung in the Norwegian communities of the Northern states. Oleana was based on the German legends of Schlaraffenland, where roast pigs trotted about with knives and forks stuck at the ready in their back inviting you to help yourself to some ham, where cakes rained from the skies and the rivers ran with beer. Originally ridiculing the fantasies of Norwegian émigrés about the life of effortless luxury awaiting across the Atlantic, it is conceivable that it may have germinated Ibsen's Peer Gynt and Gyntiana. What is quite probable is that it was a Norwegian bindle stiff singing Oleana around a jungle fire who gave the start to The Big Rock Candy Mountains, the ancient Utopian fancy converted to the day dreams of the rod-rider.
The wikipedia entry for Big Rock Candy Mountain
The wikipedia entry for Oleanna