No phone, no pool, no pets

Dinnertime in a hobo jungle, 1895

Bums, vagrants, drifters, tramps, vagabonds... It all sounds, well, pretty negative.  As in lazy, freeloading, not-to-be trusted, maybe downright sociopathic...

Ah! But hoboes... now that’s another story. Because those unwashed kings of the road were a different animal altogether – heroic, dignified, respectable....yes, respectable, but on their own terms. That’s the crucial thing. 

As the Hobo Code of Ethics of 1887 put it:
  
  Hobo Rule No. 1: ‘Decide your own life. Don’t let another person rule you.’

Before we go any further, let’s hear from John Lee Hooker on the subject of hoboing:

The word ‘hobo’, apparently, comes from ‘hoe boys’, itinerant farmhands who carried their own hoes with them as they wandered around post-Civil War America looking for work. With the building of the railroad, however, ‘hoboing’ became an established way of life – much like hunting and gathering was for their prehistoric ancestors. When you’ve hunted and gathered everything there is to hunt and gather, you simply pack up and move on to greener valleys.  And it’s a whole lot easier when you can cover a thousand miles just by jumping on a freight car!

And so they rode the rails across America all through the 20^th century, hopping  freights, sleeping in ‘hobo jungles’, knocking on back doors, doing odd jobs, picking guitars, strumming banjos, doing whatever it took to stay alive. Because a hobo, you see, is far from lazy. He’s a resourceful fellow with a horror of bourgeois life, and not afraid to pay the price for his own freedom.

Hobo, 1938

Of course, like the cowboy, the outlaw, the gangster, the biker and the rock’n’roller, the hobo is also an ‘icon’; that is to say, a fiction. To the point where those of us who’ve never hoboed a day in our lives can tell you exactly what a hobo is. It might be Chaplin’s ‘little tramp’...

...or the one Roger Miller sang about in ‘King of the Road’...

...or any number of circus clowns in stereotypical hobo drag...  

...or Woody Guthrie, who did a good bit of hoboing himself. 

In any case, the myth seems to be in good health, still able to capture our imaginations. It resurfaces from time to time, especially in popular songs. Dwight Yoakam, Buck Owens and Flaco Jiménez took a masterful swipe at it
in 1988, winning a well-deserved Grammy for this Tex-Mex hobo anthem.  

Streets of Bakersfield

I came here looking for something
I couldn't find anywhere else
Hey, I'm not trying to be nobody
I just want a chance to be myself

I've spent a thousand miles of thumbin'
Yes, I've worn blisters on my heels
Trying to find me something better
Here on the streets of Bakersfield

Hey, you don't know me but you don't like me
You say you care less how I feel
But how many of you that sit and judge me
Have walked the streets of Bakersfield?

I spent some time in San Francisco
I spent a night there in the can
They threw this drunk man in my jail cell
I took fifteen dollars from that man

Left him my watch and my old house key
Don't want folks thinkin' that I'd steal
Then I thanked him as I was leaving
And headed out for Bakersfield

Hey, you don't know me but you don't like me
You say you care less how I feel
But how many of you that sit and judge me
Have walked the streets of Bakersfield?

To read a long and fascinating history of the American hobo, check out this excellent piece by Lisa Hix in Collector’s Weekly (from which I nicked some of these photos!): 

Don’t Call them Bums: the Unsung History of America’s Hard-working Hoboes

Hobo Bob