"Big Rock Candy Mountain", first recorded by Harry McClintock in 1928, is a song about a hobo's idea of paradise, a modern version of the medieval concept of Cockaigne. It is a place where "hens lay soft boiled eggs" and there are "cigarette trees." McClintock claims to have written the song in 1895 based on tales from his misspent youth hoboing through the United States, but some believe the song, or at least aspects of it, have existed for far longer.
Read more about Big Rock Candy Mountain: History, Actual Location, Recordings, Other Uses
Famous quotes containing the words candy mountain, big, rock, candy and/or mountain:
“I’m headed for a land that’s far away
Beside the crystal fountains.
So come with me, we’ll go and see
The Big Rock Candy Mountains.”
—Unknown. The Big Rock Candy Mountains (l. 5–8)
“We can glut ourselves with how-to-raise children information . . . strive to become more mature and aware but none of this will spare us from the . . . inevitability that some of the time we are going to fail our children. Because there is a big gap between knowing and doing. Because mature, aware people are imperfect too. Or because some current event in our life may so absorb or depress us that when our children need us we cannot come through.”
—Judith Viorst (20th century)
“My spirit looks to God alone,
My rock and refuge is His throne,
In all my fears, in all my straits,
My soul on His salvation waits.”
—Isaac Watts (1674–1748)
“Why, what a candy deal of courtesy
This fawning greyhound then did proffer me!”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Nor has science sufficient humanity, so long as the naturalist overlooks the wonderful congruity which subsists between man and the world; of which he is lord, not because he is the most subtile inhabitant, but because he is its head and heart, and finds something of himself in every great and small thing, in every mountain stratum, in every new law of color, fact of astronomy, or atmospheric influence which observation or analysis lay open.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)