So goes "An Invitation to Lubberland," a 17th-century ballad, discovered this morning after observing that the sunrise looked like a strip of bacon:
That got us talking about the vision of a world made of food in the song "Big Rock Candy Mountain." What a delight it is to the hobo who tells the story. He's hungry now, but if everything were made of food, it would soon become a horror show. There'd be nothing but food.
There's a lake of stewAnd of whiskey too
I like the sunrise reflected on water. On stew? Not so much.
According to Wikipedia:
The song was first recorded [in 1928] by [Harry] McClintock, also known by his "hobo" name of Haywire Mac. McClintock said that he wrote the song, though it was likely partially based on other ballads, including "An Invitation to Lubberland"....Unlike "Big Rock Candy Mountain," Lubberland has bacon.
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22 comments:
"I like the sunrise reflected on water. On stew? Not so much."
I like the sunrise reflected on whisky. On water? Not so much.
oh, the buzzin' of the bees
in the cigarette trees
If Dylan covers "Big Rock Candy Mountain" next week, I'd say you have successfully hacked the user interface of what my youthful coworkers call "The Simulation."
Burl Ives did a fantastic job singing Big Rock Candy Mountain, though I prefer My Good Old Man. The singer eats a bushel of eggs knowing that it will kill him, and tells his wife to bury him in the chimney corner.
The first time I heard The Big Rock Candy Mountains it was a track on a made-for-preschoolers LP and sung by Burl Ives. Of course, the lyrics were bowdlerized and expurgated with no reference to cigarette trees, whiskey lakes, wooden-legged cops, or easily escaped jails. Given the vast difference between the song recorded by Haywire Mac and the version I recall from childhood, the two have little in common but musical technicalities.
As I gained in years and knowledge the song's earlier incarnations (there were many) became more familiar and I became convinced The Big Rock Candy Mountains (mountains plural, in other words, a range rather than a solitary peak of sucrose) was a folksong originating in the Great Depression when desperate men were forced to travel by any means, but mostly illegally in freight cars, to find enough temporary labor to survive and perhaps send money to a starving family left behind. How wrong I was.
The Big Rock Candy Mountain was first recorded in 1929, and doubtlessly existed years before that, which means it originated in the Roaring Twenties, a time of astonishing prosperity. Consequently, the hobo who muses on the hoboes' paradise isn't a desperate man seeking work and a restored dignity, he's a hedonist seeking to exploit working people like a parasite exploits its host. Not unlike today's so-called homeless. Perhaps we can write some new lyrics for today's stationary hoboes and their less food-oriented paradise. Let's see...
In the fentanyl fields where the dream appeals and the liberals deliver burgers,
I'll pitch my tent and forego the rent... (oh, for a rhyme with burgers. Got one?)
Sidebar:
Hobo, a word familiar to nearly American and increasingly so to English speakers worldwide, has a very obscure etymology. Some claim the word is derived from "hoe boy". As the story goes, hoe boy was a term referring to the impoverished Confederate veterans who traveled the roads and byways of the postbellum South seeking agricultural day labor. Hmmm, that etymology has a just-so character I find suspicious, but it works better than the Elizabethan hawbuck, a loutish country bumpkin. Goldsmith's Tony Lumpkin was a hawbuck, not a hobo.
In the '60s, I got to know the guy working the counter at a head shop in W. Hollywood. He was older than every other hippie I knew, and no wonder: he'd been a hobo during the Depression. Fascinating guy with stories I wish I'd written down.
He told me that the older hobos would lure young boys into the life (what we'd now call grooming) with tales of this place they were going to called Big Rock Candy Mountain. It wasn't usually for sex, he said, though it was sometimes that. It was because people were more likely to give a begging kid money than they were a disheveled adult.
I have no idea whether this, or anything else he told me, was true. But it all sure seemed plausible. And if he was making it up, the guy had missed his calling as a writer. Bukowski would've been envious. Come to think of it, Bukowski was famously living at the time (and for years after) in an apartment about a mile away. So maybe...
Wine doesn't cost a penny
in the heavenly cellars;
The angels bake the bread.
Good greens of every sort
grow in the heavenly vegetable patch,
good asparagus, string beans,
and whatever we want.
Whole dishfuls are set for us!
Good apples, good pears and good grapes,
and gardeners who allow everything!
If you want roebuck or hare,
on the public streets
they come running right up.
Should a fast day come along,
all the fishes at once come swimming with joy.
There goes Saint Peter running
with his net and his bait
to the heavenly pond.
Saint Martha must be the cook.
The Heavenly Life
(from Des Knaben Wunderhorn)
Here's another nice invite for the lubbers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dN3wEdK_vxw
The Flickr box is only an inch high, and only shows the top of the photo, and that only for a half second upon re-load. Enjoy your photos most of the time, wish I could see this one.
"The jails are made of tin
And you can walk right out again
As soon as you are in."
We are living in a hobo's dream.
Never did like the ending to that song, though:
You’ll be buggered sore
Like a hobo’s whore
On the big rock candy mountain.
JSM
"There'd be nothing but food."
Food for thought.
Version I know best is Burl Ives recording I have. Cigarette trees!
Cloudy with a chance of meatballs.
"The Flickr box is only an inch high, and only shows the top of the photo, and that only for a half second upon re-load. Enjoy your photos most of the time, wish I could see this one."
It's an intentionally cropping -- for bacon purposes.
Will have more "seeable" photos later!
"Version I know best is Burl Ives recording I have."
I too was associating the song with Ives when I was having the conversation at sunrise. I liked how that resonated with yesterday's "Okay Crackerby" post.
I can see the photo on my iPhone, but not on my computer.
Existential Crisis Gingerbread Man
The grizzled guitarist at my neighborhood dive bar frequently covers Roger Miller's King of the Road. It's not food as landscape, but still pretty cheerful given the subject matter.
Dan McClain, the late great Country Dick Montana from the Beat Farmers did this. That deep, deep ass voice…I miss Dan. I knew him.
"The streets are paved with pudding - pies"
And Desantis would eat them all with his fingers.
'Underneath the Arches' is another song in this same vein, the tune is charming but the words are appalling. It's about living under bridges.
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