Boxcar to Nowhere

A hundred years ago, it seemed as if everyone wanted to be a hobo, at least if you were listening to the radio. Carl Sandburg’s 1927 American Songbag featured a whole section of hobo songs presenting the bum as a beau ideal. Children, most of whom would never see the inside of a boxcar, grew up singing “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum!,” recorded first by Harry McClintock in 1928 and repopularized by the New Christy Minstrels in the 1960s. Along with loads of other songs, it celebrated the paradoxical appeal of the rails and the open road: freedom allied with loneliness and destitution. John Lee Hooker’s “Hobo Blues,” Jimmie Rodgers’s “Hobo Bill’s Last Ride,” and Merle Haggard’s cover of Rodgers’s “Hobo’s Meditation” would become landmarks of the genre. The album cover of Haggard’s I’m a Lonesome Fugitive (1967) depicts him climbing aboard a freight car, a look of consummate fulfillment on his face.Dreams of a tramp utopia, once termed “hobohemia,” produced classics of Americana.1 Recorded in the 1920s by McClintock, the rollicking hobo anthem “Big Rock Candy Mountain” envisions an itinerants’ paradise where cigarette trees bloom and streams of alcohol trickle down the rocks. It has since be...