Most people meet this song long before they pick up an instrument. A wanderer describes a country where food and drink come free, the weather never turns, and nobody has to work. Bluebirds and lemonade springs turn up in almost every version. Bluegrass players know it best from the first minutes of a Coen brothers film. The history behind it runs darker than the children’s record suggests.
Where it came from
Harry McClintock recorded it on September 6, 1928, in Hollywood, California. Victor issued take 2 from matrix BVE-46454 as Victor 21704, credited to “Mac,” with McClintock listed as composer. The Discography of American Historical Recordings notes he was the first performer to record the song and claimed to have written it, and adds that it may rest on existing songs. That same entry points out other sources credit Marshall P. Locke and Charles Tyner.
McClintock had lived the life the song describes. He worked as a railroad brakeman, seaman, and circus hand. He was initiated into the Industrial Workers of the World in March 1911 and took part in the Fresno Free Speech Fight. He wrote “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum,” which ran in the IWW’s Little Red Songbook, and he was credited as the first person to sing Joe Hill’s “The Preacher and the Slave” in public. By the mid 1920s he had a radio show in the San Francisco Bay Area as Radio Mac. He was born in 1884 and died in 1957.
The idea in the song is centuries older than McClintock. It belongs to the Cockaigne tradition, the imagined land of plenty that ran through European ballads for generations. Researchers tie it to “An Invitation to Lubberland,” a broadside ballad printed in 1685, and to hobo songs of the same era.
Then there is the darker claim. McClintock said the version he busked in the 1890s was no parlor song, and that he cleaned it up before he recorded it. The verse he left off is said to describe a boy who followed a hobo down the road, found no candy, and was used badly. Printed transcriptions blank out one line. Handle this carefully. The music writer Elijah Wald traces much of what circulates online to speculation posted on Mudcat Cafe in 2002 rather than to any source document, and notes that the story reached us through an interview McClintock gave Sam Eskin for Folkways, not through a court transcript. It is McClintock’s account of his own song, repeated and embroidered since. Sanitized rewrites went the other direction, turning cigarette trees into peppermint trees and streams of alcohol into lemonade and soda pop.
How it works
Three chords carry the whole thing. Song sheets put it in C, and that is the key most jams call. The common chart runs C, C7, F, and G7, which is the 1, the 4, and the 5 with two dominant sevenths added for color. The melody stays low and narrow, which suits a speaking sort of singer more than a high tenor.
The form is verse after verse with no separate chorus, so a singer can stop after two or three and hand it off. That makes it a friendly call at a slow jam, alongside other three-chord songbook staples. It also carries a risk. Everyone in the circle learned a different set of words from a different children’s record, so agree on whose version you are singing before the first downbeat. Breaks tend to follow the vocal line rather than a fiddle tune melody, which gives newer pickers a clear target.
Recordings worth hearing
Start with McClintock’s 1928 Victor record. The guitar is plain, the delivery is dry, and the song has not yet been softened for a nursery. Copies followed fast. Jack Turner cut it for Velvet Tone in 1928, and Vernon Dalhart recorded a version for Edison the next year.
Burl Ives did the most to move it toward children. Discogs dates his Decca 78, Decca 23439, to 1945, with an arrangement credited to Elie Siegmeister, while Wikipedia places the children’s re-recording in 1949. The two dates have not been reconciled in the sources here. Either way, the Ives reading is the one most American children learned, and it fits beside his other standards such as Wayfaring Stranger. Pete Seeger later recorded it for Folkways, where it sits on American Favorite Ballads. Folkways also issued Haywire Mac in 1972, an album of McClintock singing and talking with Sam Eskin.
The bluegrass audience mostly arrived in 2000. Mercury released the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack on December 5, 2000, produced by T-Bone Burnett, and placed McClintock’s 1928 recording at track 2. The album reached number one on the Billboard 200 and won Album of the Year at the Grammy Awards in February 2002. That record is why the song now turns up at festivals next to Man of Constant Sorrow and Keep on the Sunny Side.
Sources
Recording details come from the UCSB Discography of American Historical Recordings entry for Victor matrix BVE-46454, the Wikipedia article on the song, the Wikipedia article on Harry McClintock, the American Songwriter profile of McClintock, the Discogs listing for Decca 23439, the Smithsonian Folkways page for the Haywire Mac album track, and the Smithsonian Folkways page for Pete Seeger’s version.
Background on the older ballad tradition comes from Wikipedia’s article on “An Invitation to Lubberland”, and the caution about the missing verse comes from Elijah Wald’s songblog post on the song and its censorship and the Mainly Norfolk entry. Soundtrack facts come from the Wikipedia article on the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack and the AllMusic album page.