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After Eric Blair returned from Paris in the spring of 1928, he began tramping that autumn through the metropolitan area of London and his native Southwold. Around that time, a traditional ballad that had been popular in the hobo world since the turn of the century received its first recording, sung by a hobo known as Haywire Mac a.k.a. Harry McClintock. McClintock and other hobos in the U.S. and Europe had been singing the tune at least since the 1890s.1 Originally, it described a child being recruited into hobo life by tales about "The Big Rock Candy Mountains." Such recruitment efforts, however amateurish, apparently did occur, with hobos enchanting poor children with fantastic "ghost tales" featuring wondrous adventures of hobo life.2
Did the future author of AnimalFarmever hear the song? Might its hobo vision have figured in Orwell's creation of Old Major's Beasts of England and Moses the raven's fraudulent Sugarcandy Mountain? This hobo ballad, which became known as "The Big Rock Candy Mountains" - even though die unsanitized version belowwas never published verbatim in any recordings3 - runs as follows:
One sunny day in the month of May,
Ajocker he come hiking;
He come to a tree, and "Ah!" says he,
"This is just to my liking!"
Chorus:
"I'll show you the bees,
And the cigarette trees,
And the soda-water fountains,
And the lemonade springs
Where the bluebird sings
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains."
So they started away on the very same day,
The bum and the kid together,
To romp and to rove in the cigarette grove
In the land of sunny weather.
They dreamed and hiked for many days,
The mile posts they were countin',
But they never arrived at the lemonade tide
And the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
The punk rolled up his big blue eye
And said to the jocker, "Sandy,
I've hiked and hiked and wandered too,
But I ain't seen any candy.
I've hiked and hiked till my feet are sore
And I'll be damned if I hike any more
To be a homeguard with a lemonade card
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains."4
The lyrics of the last four stanzas in the best-known recorded version of the ballad are as follows5:
In the Big Rock Candy...