Big Rock Candy Mountain: A Song History
"The Big Rock Candy Mountains" is a hobo's daydream of paradise: a wanderer sets out for a land where every hardship of life on the road has been turned upside down.[1] Harry McClintock, the singer known as "Haywire Mac," claimed to have written it, and the label of his 1928 record names him as composer.[1][2] The Ballad Index, however, lists the author as unknown and dates its earliest version to 1906, when Marshall Locke and Charles Tyner published one; its notes take that date as evidence that the song is older than McClintock's involvement, yet they also allow that he may have begun work on it in 1905.[1] The same notes trace the idea of a land of plenty back to the seventeenth-century "Invitation to Lubberland" and name "The Land of Cokaygne," in a British Library manuscript, as another possible source.[1] The Discography of American Historical Recordings sums up the question by noting that McClintock was the first to record it but that it "may have been based on existing songs."[2]
Rembrandt van Rijn, Two Tramps, a Man and a Woman, etching, c. 1634. Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the song.
McClintock made his recording for Victor in Hollywood on September 6, 1928, singing to his own guitar.[2] Victor issued it late in 1928 on disc 21704, paired with his "The Bum Song, No. 2."[3] Other singers, among them Vernon Dalhart on Edison and Frankie Marvin on Columbia, recorded it in 1929, and new songs to the same tune appeared, such as Stuart Hamblen's "The Big Rock Candy Mountains - No. 2" for Victor in 1930.[1] According to the music historian Elijah Wald, McClintock said he had had "to clean that song up," and when Sam Eskin, in an interview issued by Folkways Records, asked him for the original version, he declined to sing it.[4] Wald also mentions a story that McClintock went to court in the late 1920s to defend his copyright, but he points out that the quotations offered for it come instead from the Eskin interview, and none of the sources consulted here identifies the court or the case.[4] McClintock's own life story calls for similar care: Jack Neely of the Knoxville History Project has found records placing him in Knoxville from 1898 to 1902, the very years when the usual accounts of his life put him overseas.[5]
Neely observes that the song eventually became a children's song.[5] Wald adds that many songbooks go further, removing even such basic hobo fantasies as drink and release from jail.[4] Burl Ives recorded it for Decca in New York on March 23, 1945, at a session of selections from Sing Out, Sweet Land! directed by Elie Siegmeister.[6] A McClintock recording of the song appears on the soundtrack album of the film O Brother, Where Art Thou?[7] Judy House includes it in Jam Across America, a 178-page jam book, published by House herself, of songs drawn from the playlists of mountain dulcimer clubs around the country and arranged in DAD tuning.[8]
Sources
- The Traditional Ballad Index: "Big Rock Candy Mountain, The".
- Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Victor matrix BVE-46454. The Big Rock Candy Mountains / Mac [i.e., Harry K. McClintock]".
- Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Victor 21704 (Black label (popular) 10-in. double-faced)".
- Elijah Wald, Old Friends: A Songobiography: "Big Rock Candy Mountain (Mac McClintock/ censorship)".
- Knoxville History Project: "The Birds and The Bees and The Cigarette Trees".
- Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Decca matrix 72797. Big rock candy mountain / Burl Ives".
- Universal Music Italia: "O Brother, Where Art Thou?".
- Judy House: "Jam Across America".
- Image: Rembrandt van Rijn, Two Tramps, a Man and a Woman, etching, c. 1634. The Cleveland Museum of Art.