The Sporadic Curmudgeon

There is a commercial out now for a fast-food chain featuring a cowboy walking around strumming a guitar and singing about sandwiches to the tune of “Big Rock Candy Mountain.” I thought it was faintly amusing and went on with my business. But something about it struck me as being kind of off, somehow. I couldn’t put my finger on it, though.

Later, “Big Rock Candy Mountain” popped into my head, and I started humming it. That’s when it came to me. “Big Rock Candy Mountain” isn’t a happy song at all. Sure, it’s funny and uptempo, but behind the window dressing it’s a song about disenfranchised people leading hard, degrading, miserable lives full of danger and want. It’s a profoundly sad song depicting people so beaten down by a desperate existence that their only remaining dreams are childish and pathetic.

Although the original version dates to the late 1890s, the version most people remember was written in the 1920s by Harry “Haywire Mac” McClintock and popularized during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Here’s an excerpt from the lyrics:

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains, all the cops have wooden legs
And the bulldogs all have rubber teeth and the hens lay soft-boiled eggs
The farmer’s trees are full of fruit and the barns are full of hay
Oh I’m bound to go where there ain’t no snow
Where the rain don’t fall, the wind don’t blow
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains, you never change your socks
And little streams of alcohol come a-trickling down the rocks
The brakemen have to tip their hats and the railroad bulls are blind
There’s a lake of stew and of whiskey too
And you can paddle all around ‘em in a big canoe
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains the jails are made of tin,
And you can walk right out again as soon as you are in
There ain’t no short-handled shovels, no axes, saws or picks,
I’m a-goin’ to stay where you sleep all day
Where they hung the jerk that invented work
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains

This is not the song of a prosperous man. This is the song of a man that has nothing.

My own grandfather spent part of the Depression hopping freights trying to find work. He didn’t look back on those days with fondness. Being a hobo in the thirties wasn’t generally something one did for fun.

So let’s be clear about what the marketing golems are doing: they are using a song about homeless people to sell overpriced greasy food. What’s the matter? The rights to “Brother, Can You Spare A Dime” were too expensive?

It has been called to my attention that perhaps I should just lighten the fuck up.