As the 1940s dawned, Harry Partch was looking toward a new horizon, turning away from menial labor and its associations with the migrant and moving back into contact with musical society. Part of his new attitude toward the culture he felt had rejected him came from the increasing hardships, both physical and psychological, of his nomadic existence. The freedom he initially sought was constantly undercut by Californians' attitudes toward migrant workers and the sheer number looking for work: near Marysville he noted that “there were at least a hundred peach pickers for every job, and the banks of the American River were so thick with hobos that—at night—you'd have thought it was the site of an army bivouac.” Beyond the physical travails was an increasing sense of desperation about the impact of his situation on his compositional progress. He had not completed a musical work in five years and had been unable to find publication for his most recent major work—Bitter Music. The only instruments to play his scale remained his Adapted Viola and Adapted Guitar, with a discarded keyboard for the Ptolemy the only testimony of the previous years' work. At almost forty years old, he had little to show for close to two decades of grappling with his new musical ideas, and he felt stymied by his lack of achievement.

Dorothea Lange's reputation as the most astute photographic chronicler of the Great Depression provides ample reason to examine two of her photographs of hoboes and transients, both as prelude and accompaniment to Harry Partch's musical journal Bitter Music. In many ways, these three works of art achieve a certain synergy. Partch's words reveal the minds of the men Lange's camera captured, sharing their passions, their failures, their sense of humor, their sense of themselves and of the world around them, and all the quixotic depths of their characters. His music floats their words through time to conjure them afresh for us. Lange's photographs bring concrete reality to Partch's words. Here, in black and white, are the men of whom Partch wrote. The slope of their shoulders, the tilt of their heads, the condition of their clothes—all say something about their lives. And, beyond anything Lange's work unveils about Bitter Music, by delving into her choice of images for the FSA, the Depression-era perception of homeless wanderers becomes abundantly clear.

The first photograph, Lange's “Toward Los Angeles, California. 1937” (fig. 3.1), has two prominent features. The first to catch the viewer's eye is the human component: two men walking a dusty, deserted road. Their backs face the viewer and their heads are bowed.

When Harry Partch began picking fruit, riding the rails, sleeping under the stars, and discovering the bounty and arduousness of hobo life in 1928, that very existence was vanishing from the American scene. Having filled the West, railroad mileage peaked during the Great War and then slowly began decreasing, restricting the hobo's movement. Tractors, combines, chain saws, and steam shovels all came into widespread use in the years after the war as machines replaced human labor. As settled towns sprang up throughout the West, timber, mining, and farming companies began to rely on a local labor force instead of a wandering one. As Partch discovered firsthand in the early 1930s, hoboes were forced to roam farther and farther afield, with fewer options for movement, to find enough work to survive.

Although faster harvesting techniques and more and newer equipment stymied the need for hoboes throughout the West, no invention threatened the hobo way of life more than the automobile. Suddenly, hoboes were not the only Americans who regularly took to the road. The freedom to go where they wanted when they wanted, a defining characteristic of hobo subculture, belonged to anyone who could afford a car. And Henry Ford determined that anyone would mean everyone. Instead of gleaming tracks moving masses of people in single directions, slivers of highway threaded the nation, moving individuals in multiple directions.

In the second part of Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road (first published in 1957), narrator Sal Paradise and his friend Dean Moriarty pile into a car with Dean's wife Marylou and Ed Dunkel, and take off from the East Coast headed for California. Watching the miles slip away beneath them, Sal exults, “We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move. … [Dean] and I suddenly saw the whole country like an oyster for us to open; and the pearl was there, the pearl was there.” To post-World War II Americans the idea of the frontier seemed lost in the distant past, but many young men and women still wanted to go West, to seek their fortunes beyond the horizon, to move. The road, stretching from every front door to every point imaginable, became a dominant artistic metaphor for self-discovery, and a particular character arose to inhabit it. Through Sal and Dean's exploits, Kerouac solidified the “road hero,” a character who found redemption and release on the open road.

The road hero is an enduring cultural mythic figure in American music, film, literature, and life that speaks to a strand of American reality.

Harry Partch was a hobo composer. At least, that was the impression held by most musicians living and working in New York City during World War II. It was an image that made him moderately successful at the time and inspired most of his music from the period, but it is also one that has clouded Partch's biography. Seeking to view this pivotal time anew, this chapter picks up the threads of Partch's life from completing Barstow and making his “transcontinental hobo trip” in September 1941 to his League of Composers' concert in the spring of 1944 and subsequent move to Wisconsin. This period is crucial in Partch's reception: during this time he formulated his hobo persona, first articulated his particular brand of conceptual musical exoticism, and cultivated close personal and professional friendships with composers from Otto Luening to Douglas Moore that helped him realize he would likely always work outside the musical community, no matter his preferences or his efforts to gain access to its circle.

Partch's nomadic lifestyle makes reconstructing his experiences in the early 1940s no easy task. Although he did save letters, drawings, and writings if they held special significance to him, in many cases the record is patchy at best. Furthermore, he was not given to focusing on the past.

Barstow clearly placed Partch on a new compositional path, but two final years of homeless wandering passed before he began to travel it. When he did return to the hobo in his music, he crafted a composition that became the cornerstone of his passage from the hobo jungles to the periphery of the American musical culture that he so scorned. That piece, based like Barstow on scribbled passages from a pocket notebook that reveled in hobo voices, was substantively different from the hitchhiker-inscribed work. These scribbled passages were words spoken by and to the composer, and the hobo voices were his own as often as those of others. U.S. Highball recounted Partch's own hobo journey and as such was a distinctly personal work, casting his triumphs and tragedies out for the world to share. Ultimately U.S. Highball became the work through which he demonstrated his version of a conceptually exotic American musical sound, and first argued for a renaissance of ancient musical practices in a modern language. It is such a pivotal work in Partch's output that it also acts as this study's cornerstone, the work through which Partch's full engagement with the hobo is most clearly defined.

U.S. Highball's reception throughout its lifespan clearly reflects Partch's success in communicating his adventure.

In order to understand fully why Partch adopted the hobo persona, we must first explore the hobo as construed by artists, writers, filmmakers, and the news media. Decades of use by various crusaders, intellectuals, and politicians created a multilayered image of the hobo by the 1930s and 1940s, which Partch accessed as a way to define himself. Most Americans of the time fell roughly into two camps in their attitudes toward the hobo. One side viewed the hobo as a rugged American individualist, flouting the law to live as he liked and reveling in the absolute freedom to control his destiny. This hobo lured many artist-intellectuals with the promise of experiencing America, including writers from Carl Sandburg to W. H. Davies, Vachel Lindsay, Harvey Kemp, Jack Kerouac, Robert Service, and Jim Tully. The other side viewed the hobo as a pitiful figure, victim of the rising industrial order. As manual labor on and around the railroad subsided, crusaders held up the unemployed hobo as the dismal future of American society. Homeless legions would overrun cities, these reformers argued, unless society took action. Although they were historically contradictory, these two representations persisted through the early twentieth-century's silent screen, with images such as Charlie Chaplin as the Little Tramp being bested by life, only to gain victory through humor, perseverance, and the freedom to be himself.

During the time that Harry Partch rode the rails and then transformed those trips into musical form, American perception of the hobo was shifting once more. Through the late 1930s and early 1940s nostalgia grew for pre-Depression hoboes in response to the situation brewing with migrants and transients on the West Coast. This transition can best be seen in the 1940 New York Times Magazine article “That Vanishing American, the Hobo.” The article opens with the stark observation that the hobo population had fallen from a high of a million and a half in the late 1920s to 25,000. Author Lawrence Stessin then wistfully worries over these numbers while foreseeing a future in which the hobo joins the American Indian as a vanishing people. Although Stessin views the new reliance on well-paid regular labor as a positive advance in American society, his article—printed in a prominent East Coast publication—reveals a striking change to the attitudes of even ten years earlier. Hoboes were no longer just freedom-seeking wanderers at odds with industrial society; now they were iconic figures of the Old West, new archetypes in the American psyche. No wonder Harry Partch began to highlight his time on the road as hobo: as the Dust Bowl migrant came to take the hobo's place as the most feared and despised Western figure, he naturally wished to control his persona and history and show them in the most acceptable and profitable light.

This is the story of a man who became a hobo out of necessity and remained one for its freedoms. It is the story of a composer who rejected the tenets of music as he found them and sought to return music to its roots. It is the story of American music, and how music reflects and reacts with the culture in which it lives. It is the story of Harry Partch and his music.

Two important questions frame this story: “Why Harry Partch?” and “Why hoboes?” Those questions entwine in all the scholarship and literature on this uniquely American composer. They inform reviews like Alex Ross's, of a production of Partch's version of Oedipus, where he proclaimed: “Of all the triumphantly weird characters who have roamed the frontiers of American art, none ever went quite as far out as the composer Harry Partch. His exit from civilization has assumed the status of legend, and it's all true.” And they stretch back to 1949, where, in his preface to the first edition of Partch's formative book Genesis of a Music, Otto Luening eloquently pinpointed why the hobo was crucial to any approach to the composer's music: