Hoboes loved singing; it was free. They grafted their own words onto the popular songs of the day and sometimes worked out their own tunes as well. In the end they contributed much to American folk music. Perhaps the most famous of all hobo songs was “The Big Rock Candy Mountains.” Mac McClintock claimed to have written it, and his claim is as good as any. McClintock, who became one of the great Wobbly troubadours, ran away from home at fourteen to join the circus. When the circus folded in 1896, he went on the bum and, in a New Orleans saloon, found that he could turn a couple of dollars by singing. He was delighted but soon realized that there were dangers in his new trade. “As a ‘producer,’” he wrote, 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 the jocker that 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, and on one occasion I jumped into the darkness from a box-car door—from a train that must have been doing better than thirty miles an hour. I lay in the ditch where I landed until picked up by a section gang next morning.

So it is not surprising that in its initial form “The Big Rock Candy Mountains” was cynical, bitter, and rough. But as it was reworked by hundreds of hoboes in the jungles and around the water tanks, it gradually lost its sharp corners and became a jaunty, wistful Utopian ballad. Here it is as recorded in Alan Lomax’s great anthology Folk Songs of North America: