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.
There the farmer’s trees are full of fruit,
And the barns are full of hay,
And I’m bound to go
Where there ain’t no snow,
And the rain don’t fall,
And the wind don’t blow
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
You never change your socks,
And the little streams of alcohol
Come a-tricklin’ down the rocks.
. . .
There’s a lake of stew, . . .
And a gin lake, too,
You can paddle all around ’em
In a big canoe
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
—Harry “Haywire Mac” Kirby McClintock (1882–1957), “The Big Rock Candy Mountains”
In the first decades of the twentieth century, southerners—Confederate veterans and former slaves, newly arrived European immigrants, sharecroppers and landowners, mill workers and businessmen, tenant farmwives and middle-class club women, hobos and drifters—struggled to gain secure footing in the rapidly shifting landscape of the American South. As the old plantocracy crumbled, a mythic Dixie was revived in the post-Reconstruction South. Food provides a window onto monumental changes in this era as southerners struggled to recover from the Civil War and strained to embrace modernity. The pull between the past and a vision of progress in the South is exemplified in pivotal movements between the late nineteenth century and the beginning of World War II in which food signifies the region’s identity struggle. Southerners witnessed the birth of the New South, the term popularized in 1886 by Henry Grady, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, to describe a coming era of “growing progress and prosperity.”1 Black southerners demanded their rightful place in this changing South despite constant threats of violence and even death.
Native Tennessean Harry “Haywire Mac” McClintock’s 1928 recording of “The Big Rock Candy Mountains” sprang from this New South world.2 The son of railroad men, McClintock was an adventurer/country singer/union activist. His ballad touched a nerve during the Depression years, as thousands of unemployed men left the South and wandered the country “riding the rails” searching for work, food, and shelter. “The Big Rock Candy Mountains” described a land where food was abundant and free for the taking—“a lake of stew, . . . / and a gin lake, too”—a distant fantasy in the pinched times of the American South.
In Part 2, we explore these New South worlds through the lens of regional food politics and practices. Chapter 7 considers the monumental repercussions for regional food production and access as southern agriculture transformed from plantations to sharecropping and industrial farming, impacted by federal relief programs and legislation in the first decades of the twentieth century. In Chapter 8, we examine the reform-minded efforts of home economists and the field of domestic science to address the problems of a deeply malnourished South. Chapter 9 analyzes two southern “dietaries,” ethnographic case studies of diet at the turn of the twentieth century that reveal the intransigent racism of the era as manifested in disease and nutritional collapse. Chapter 10 investigates the early twentieth-century settlement schools in both the Lowcountry and the mountain South, where changing the southern diet was at the heart of educational programs. In Chapter 11, we return to the rural South and the homes of poor and working-class southerners, where Progressive-Era reforms and educational interventions deeply shaped southern food and health. In Chapter 12, the daily lives and foodways of working-class and impoverished southerners are examined through the southern university-based social science research and New Deal documentation of the 1930s. To conclude this journey through the New South, Chapters 13 and 14 consider the “selling of the South” to the nation through a new food-centered consumer culture and tourism that promoted branded regional narratives.