Lost Lands of Cockaigne
By:
August 25, 2010
Check out Baby Gramps‘ old-school, freak-folk rendition of “Big Rock Candy Mountain”:
With his Rip Van Winkle beard, Popeye vocal stylings, and six-string chops, Baby Gramps catches the song’s feral essence. First recorded in 1928 by Harry McClintock, the tune paints a twentieth-century vision of the primordial lowbrow utopia, Cockaigne: a land of milk, honey, and liberal splashes of alcohol, where work is abolished and everything good is free of charge.
But in the late twentieth century, Haywire Mac’s hobo paradise was defanged. How does a song about cigarette trees become a children’s ditty? Maybe Lawrence Welk’s to blame —
Only the minions of one of the twentieth century’s scariest impresarios could turn a land of milk and honey into a polygamous, dystopian, hayseed-Stepford-wives idyll. Perhaps one of the twentieth century’s strangest legacies is a proliferation of creepy Cockaignes —
