Dude, Where’s My Van? Part 19: A Hobo’s Guide to Hitchhikers

What music best captures the people living through the Great Depression?

In those days, a popular option was to not capture it in music.

Most people wanted songs to divert their attention away from their trials and tribulations, like the glamor and energy of jazz, or maybe the sweet whimsy of pop.

Some jazz and pop musicians channeled the blues in their songs, and that was one way to conjure somber moods. 

Of course, the 1930s were when talented troubadours from the Mississippi Delta and other parts of the rural South were putting their seminal brand of guitar blues to record.

These musicians grafted complex arrangements upon standard blues chords, sometimes using the neck of a beer bottle as a slide to bend their notes into stylized twangs

.More than anything, the lyrics of the songs focused on sorrow, on people falling on hard times. Of the more commercial singers, only Billie Holiday knew how to channel pain this raw.

In white America, there was the music of Woody Guthrie. In addition to being gritty and unvarnished like Delta blues, several of Guthrie’s folk tunes actually talk about the conditions of the Depression. He put particular focus on the Dust Bowl, a man-made ecological disaster of drought and dust storms (brought on by rampant overdevelopment) that consumed the Midwest. Guthrie’s songs were stark, sometimes grim snapshots of middle America at the time, and accordingly he has been dubbed “the troubadour of the Dust Bowl.”

But we’re not here to talk about him either.

For today’s entry on Depression era musical documentaries, we will be heading to the realm of weirdo avant-folk.

Ladies and gentlemen:

Meet Harry Partch.

The composer, inventor, and all-around outsider artist Harry Partch was born in Oakland, California, 1901 to parents who were both missionaries. Harry would eventually grow contemptuous not only of religion, but of society and conformity in general.

As a gay man living in rural America in the early decades of the 20th century, he would learn to seek freedom in absolute individuality.

Partch attended the University of California in 1920 to study music. But he soon left dissatisfied, finding the conventions of contemporary Western theory to be stifling, tired, and…wrong, for a reason he couldn’t quite articulate. 

Upon reading a book by the German physiologist Herman van Helmholtz: On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music, Harry’s life was transformed.

He learned that the tempered tones of the Western classical tradition did not in fact correspond to pure tones of sound.

In Helmholtz’s work, Partch found scholarly validation for his feeling that these revered musical traditions were simply off. He would eventually come to regard these traditions as fraudulent. As a lie perpetuated by conspiracy.

“For some hundreds of years, the truth of just intonation, which is defined in any good music dictionary, has been hidden.

One could almost say maliciously, because truth always threatens the ruling hierarchy, or they think so.” 

THUS SPOKE HARRY PARTCH

To create his own music, Partch largely started from scratch. He found inspiration from ancient Greek music theory, but his musical ambitions required that he develop and perfect his own musical tone system: a radical new world of sound to completely supplant the old order.

Naturally, Partch found some kindred spirits in Ultra-Modernists such as Henry Cowell and Charles Seeger, and also Aaron Copland. And in time Partch would create musical works with his unique tone system.

That tone system is perhaps best realized in Partch’s later career works, which showcase his many elaborately self-designed instruments. Fascinating stuff, truly, but they can also be somewhat operatic and ostentatious. 

His early recordings, in contrast, are wonderfully rough pieces of oddball art. 

My favorite is one of his first compositions, called “Barstow: Eight Hitchhikers’ Inscriptions,” recorded in 1941.

“Barstow” was composed from notes he wrote during his years spent traveling the country as a hobo. It is a vivid collection of musical snapshots of vagrant people waiting for rides and better prospects during the Great Depression. 

As the subtitle of the piece indicates, the lyrics consist almost entirely of writings that Partch had observed in Barstow, California during his travels. They were scribblings from fellow hitchhikers that happened to catch his eye. 

After announcing the inscription number for each entry, Partch reads the inscription itself rather straightforwardly, then repeats the content in a more dramatic, singsong style. 

Although the inscriptions are not without some dark moments (“I wish I was dead”) the tone is typically light (“but today I am a man”), made even more so with Partch’s giddy singing, voice acting, and yodeling. 

What results is an undoubtedly bizarre, often enigmatic, but also surprisingly touching and humane portrait of an oft-forgotten folk during an impossibly bleak time.

You truly have to hear it.

The 1967 re-recording of “Barstow” is worth a listen as well. This version is much more intricately arranged, with even more of a dramatic, affected approach to reading and singing. Listeners of Dr. Demento’s countdowns will recognize parts of this one.

Partch’s radical new musical system never did supplant the work of Bach or Beethoven in terms of fame or influence, but he did sow the seeds for plenty of outsiders to come. Before there was Moondog, or Captain Beefheart, or Tom Waits, or Daniel Johnston…there was Harry Partch.

Not to mention.

Thanks to his astute observations, and his rather detached way of endearing himself to broader society, Partch was able to shed light on some transient life moments of poor vagrants, and give voice to their own words.

These people, so often neglected as nobodies, were granted pride of place in a musical work. One that brings warmth and humanity to those people and their uncertain circumstances.

Let’s all give a toast to this other Depression Troubadour and his Hobo’s guide to hitchhikers.

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