"Hallelujah, I'm a Bum" (Roud 7992) is an American folk song that responds with humorous sarcasm to unhelpful moralizing about the circumstance of being a hobo.[1] The song's authorship is uncertain, but according to hobo poetry researcher Bud L. McKillips, the words were written by an IWW member. Carl Sandburg collected the song for his anthology The American Songbag, and he wrote that it was "heard at the water tanks of railroads in Kansas in 1897 and from harvest hands who worked in the wheat fields of Pawnee County, was picked up later by the I. W. W.'s, who made verses of their own for it, and gave it a wide fame."[2] Some verses may have been written by a Kansas City hobo known only as "One-Finger Ellis," who scribbled it on the wall of his prison cell in 1897.[3] There is also a questionable theory that Harry McClintock, an IWW member,[4][5] could have written it in 1899 when he was only fifteen.[6]
Historian Mark Sullivan in his book Our Times cites the song as experiencing a sudden and unexpected revival in 1928.
A 1933 musical comedy film is titled Hallelujah, I'm a Bum. It stars Al Jolson, who featured a song of the same title, but entirely different tune. Only the lyrics "Hallelujah, I'm a bum" are reused. In the UK, where the word "bum" is crude slang for the human posterior, the soundtrack was edited so that "bum" was replaced with a short whistle.
The music was quoted in the Charlie Chaplin movie Modern Times (1936), when Charlie is released from the home for the bewildered and trudges along the street before picking up a red flag that has dropped off the back of a truck. To get the attention of the truck driver, Charlie starts waving the flag around, which causes a crowd of radical trade unionists to start marching behind him, believing that a revolution has begun. The sequence ends when Charlie, who has no idea the union members are following him, is arrested as a Communist agitator.
The song is requested of Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes by a co-prisoner in an early scene of the Elia Kazan movie A Face in the Crowd (1957).
The song is adapted, with same tune and some words revised, as "Hallelujah I'm a Cat" by Garrison Keilor and Frederica von Stade in the CD "Songs of the Cat".
^H. K. McClintock was initiated into the IWW by W.F. Little, (Walter Frederick Little is Frank H. Little’s brother), Union No. 66, on March 4, 1911, Dep.Transportation
^Mac and Joe Hill were Spellbinders for the IWW and would show up as they did at the Tucker strike on June 14, 1913. (Salt Lake Tribune)
