‘If Dirt Were a Kingdom…’ John Clegg on Oral Literature
by and published in Edition Eight of Pomegranate
The surest way to murder oral literature is to transcribe it. Normally responsive to its audience, it becomes inert and still, while its characteristic processes of variation, transformation and natural selection come to an end. Anthropologically, it can be a necessary procedure: these literatures belong to precise times and places, and change so quickly they may be impossible to reconstruct in a few years.
What can we, as writers and readers of contemporary poetry, hope to gain by picking apart the dead body of an oral literature? Short answer: it depends on the literature. The earliest mythologies teach us primarily about archetype and character. Later oral traditions offer lessons in language and landscape: both Ted Hughes and Simon Armitage derive some of their sense of place from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf translation, I believe, impacts directly on the language of his recent verse. Grimm’s Fairy Tales suggest skewed, alternative structures of narrative. Oral culture as a whole offers one overarching lesson, however: how to make speech memorable. ‘A poem’, writes Don Paterson, ‘is a little machine for remembering itself.’ If so, oral poetry is where these machines get tested to destruction.
The most recent oral literature in the West was composed by hoboes. ‘Tramps and hoboes are the last of the ballad makers. Not in the Tennessee hills, or among the Sea Island Negroes, or in any other such arrested community is there a more vigorous balladry than that which has been flourishing for the past fifty years in America’s peripatetic underworld.’ So wrote George Milburn in 1930, in his introduction to The Hobo’s Hornbook. Even before the Great Depression, mobs of itinerant workers and out-of-workers would gather in improvised shanties along the railway lines known as ‘jungles’, and around the campfires they would sing songs, tell stories and recite poems. These artforms blurred into one another at the edges: ballads could be spoken, chanted or sung, poems could be set to music, and stories could transform into narrative verse.
The first question we ought to ask is: was any of it much good? Oral literature survives, of course, by entertaining the audience it’s written for, but we may not share that audience’s enthusiasms, prejudices or cultural points of reference. (The Iliad travels brilliantly, while Norse skaldic verse travels pretty badly.) Perhaps surprisingly, much hobo poetry is extremely readable today. The best of it displays a joy in words and sounds – especially the mysterious power of naming, a preoccupation in many oral literatures. This description of a hobo convention in Lehigh is typical:
There was Conchee Pete and Bucket Seat, Big Fish and The Nailer. Goggles Blue and Button Shoe, Ogden Ike and Ned the Sailor. There was Wisconsin Slim and Sunny Jim, Binney Frost and The Big Warhorse, Boston Fish and the Wheeling Kid, Throw-Me-Out Dutch and Alton Butch. There was Sammy Slop and Philly Hop, Measlie Mike the Jobber; The Auctioneer and Bughouse O’Rear, And Obie Beck the robber.Faux-oral poetry (Kipling is an obvious culprit) tends to be strict on rhyme and metre. Here, both are extremely loose; consonantal rhyme (Frost / Warhorse), vowel rhyme (Fish / Kid) and eye-rhyme (Butch / Dutch) are all employed, as if the poem were a tribute to Paul Muldoon. The metre is the poem’s engine, constantly accelerating – it’s impossible not to speed up when you speak the line ‘Boston Fish and the Wheeling Kid’ – up to ‘Bughouse O’Rear’, who reins in the pace a little.
The internal rhymes are an obvious formal feature shared by some of the hobo narrative ballads:
I pulled a deal in Guayaquil In an Inca silver mine, And before they found it was salted ground I was safe in the Argentine.Again, for a poetry largely written and recited by illiterates (Nels Anderson offers some sobering estimates of hobo literacy), the joy in language is astonishing. The second line of the above stanza displays great formal command and attention to sound, down to the level of prepositions (‘in an Inca…’). Milburn suggests an ear for metre was a valuable possession in hobo camps: ‘the lowest greasetail, if he has dithyrambic talents, may count on an enthusiastic welcome at the mulligan pot.’ (Mulligan stew was the archetypal hobo foodstuff, made, like Irish stew, with whatever came to hand. The hoboes may have vanished, but mulligan stew eating societies persist in the USA to this day.)
Hobo poetry provides a useful testing ground for many assertions about contemporary poetry. Charles Simic writes, for instance, ‘We speak of rhyme as a memory aid, but not of striking images and unusual similitudes which have a way of making themselves impossible to forget.’ If this is true, we might assume hobo balladeers would have discovered it (more likely by chance than conscious design; poems which are impossible to forget are going to be the ones which survive for the anthologist) – and true enough, a couple of minutes flicking through the Hobo’s Hornbook turns up lines which would not be out of place in Plath. ‘Here’s a little red song to the god of the guts’: forget that if you can. U. Utah Phillips (the Golden Voice of the Great Southwest), with his description of a cook on a wagon train, offers an equally memorable picture:
You’re too old to wrangle and ride in the swing. You beat the triangle and you curse everything. If dirt were a kingdom then you would be kingOr even – though familiarity has left it somewhat tarnished – the lyric attributed to Harry ‘Mac’ McClintock (or, in some places, ‘Frypan Jack’):
O, the buzzing of the bees in the cigarette trees! The soda-water fountain! The lemonade springs where the bluebird sings In the big rock-candy mountain!The melody is haunting and beautiful, but it distributes the emphasis unnaturally in the chorus:
x x / x / x / x In the big rock-candy mountain!which leads to a common misunderstanding of ‘big rock’ as a place name (‘Bigrock’). The reason for this is obvious enough: the lyric is a rewriting of a seventeenth-century ballad called ‘An Invitation to Lubberland’. (The equivalent line in ‘ÉLubberland’ is ‘And the hills are sugar-candy!’, which distributes the stresses correctly for the same tune.) ‘ÉLubberland’ was not much reprinted, and it’s a mystery where the author of ‘Big Rock Candy Mountain’ picked it up from.
Because of its obvious relationship with ‘…Lubberland’, I date this version of ‘Big Rock Candy Mountain’ – the most popular, used to great effect in the opening sequence of O Brother, Where Art Thou? – as the earliest surviving. The version Milburn gives as #1 comes with a disturbing preamble: ‘In many small cities and towns the children of poor whites use the railroad yards as their playgrounds. From these urchins the jockers sometimes recruit their road kids, and to entice them they tell them tales of tramp life. These fabrications are known as “ghost stories.” To homeguards, “Big Rock Candy Mountain” may appear a nonsense song, but to all pied pipers in on the know it is an amusing exaggeration of the ghost stories used in recruiting kids.’ Reading this alternative version gives the original a newly sinister edge:
In the very same month on the very same day A hoosier’s son came hiking; Said the bum to the son, ‘O, will you come To the Big Rock Candy Mountains.’Several stanzas seem to be missing from Milburn’s transcription, presumably obscene (the hobo and child intend to ‘romp and rove in the cigarette grove’); this spirit of censorship has also led to the loss of most of a much longer ballad called ‘The Ramblings of Alton Slim in the Sweet Potato Mountains’. Confusingly, both cut off with the hero being described as a ‘lemonade card’ – apparently a term of hobo abuse, although Milburn’s helpful glossary does not include it. (Milburn’s glossary does, however, include mush faker – ‘a hobo umbrella maker’.)
The hoboes have vanished. Their poetry would have disappeared with them, were it not for the efforts of a few determined transcribers – George Milburn chief among them. It is not solely of anthropological interest; nor is it merely a sideshow or curiosity. ‘The Hobo’s Hornbook’ contains some of the best American poetry from the first two decades of the twentieth century (as well as some of the worst, but that goes without saying). With a new Great Depression perhaps upon us, we might do well to revisit it; in any case, it does not deserve to be forgotten. In the words of U. Utah Phillips (who sadly passed away last year): ‘as I have said so often before, a long memory is the most radical idea in America.’ Not just America.
John Clegg
John Clegg was born in 1986 and studies for a PhD in Durham. Some of his poems are featured in the upcoming Salt Book of Younger Poets, as well as Succour, The Rialto, Mercy and online at Pomegranate. His e-chapbook Advancer is published by Silkworms Ink, and a full collection is forthcoming from Salt.