The song Big Rock Candy Mountain got stuck in my head the other day, it was in the background of some Instagram clip. It’s a classic old folk song, I think everyone knows it. I kinda/sorta did but like a lot of ear worms once it got lodged in my skull I realized I knew maybe a couple of lines, at best. The best cure for an ear worm is to listen to the song so I found it on Youtube…the OG version (there are apparently several). A couple of interesting things – I could tell the song was old from the way it sounded but it has more miles on it than I thought, it was first recorded by Harry McClintock in 1928. He says that:

“…he wrote the song in 1895, based on tales from his youth hoboing through the United States while working for the railroad as a brakeman.”

The lyrics were a little surprising, too. I thought it was just a silly kids song (like Candy Land or something). It’s actually a hobo’s tale of his journey to find the fabled “Rock Candy Mountains” where a land exists that is a hobo’s heaven. The box cars are always empty, cigarettes grow on trees, there’s a whiskey lake, the cops have wooden legs, and they “hung the jerk who invented work”. Cute. 

There were several kid-friendly, sanitized versions that were recorded in the decades that followed (which may account for my hazy memory of it being a more innocent song). Cigarette tress became “peppermint trees” and the whiskey lake was now soda pop. I’m tempted to say it’s a metaphor for sobriety but I’m pretty sure that would be over-thinking it. 

Finally bringing everything full circle – the OG song itself was actually a cleaned up version of the original folk song as performed by Mr. McClintock prior to recording it. The original lyrics described a young boy being recruited into the hobo life by tales of the ‘Big Rock Candy Mountain’ and ended with a line (deleted from the recorded version):

 The song is generally agreed to be a modern day version of the Medieval fabled land of plenty ‘Cockaigne‘, which is pronounced exactly like cocaine. I looked around and apparently that’s coincidental but dang that is interesting 😅 . 

I really want to say there’s a deeper, darker message lurking here wherein our ideas of paradise, centering around unchecked self-indulgence, lead us to our own ruin. Our heaven is in fact hell. It’s a trap. But it’s just a silly song, right?