In his 1928 hit, the American singer Harry McClintock conjured a vision of hobo utopia. ‘In the Big Rock Candy Mountains/ All the cops have wooden legs/ And the bulldogs all have rubber teeth/ And the hens lay soft-boiled eggs.’ The song recounts the fantasies of a picaresque American tramp, but its original version presented something darker. Before sanitization for radio, amid the delights of ‘cigarette trees’ and alcohol ‘trickling down the rocks’, it ended with the lines: ‘I’ve hiked and hiked till my feet are sore/ I’ll be god damned if I hike anymore/ To be buggered sore like a hobo’s whore/ On the Big Rock Candy Mountains.’ This fantasy song describes a young man’s initiation into the often brutal reality of the hobo underground.