Hoboes, Rubbish, and “The Big Rock Candy Mountain”

In 2004, fast-food chain Burger King introduced a new television advertisement into heavy rotation. The spot opens with a black-and-white image of singer Darius Rucker (most famous for his work with rock band Hootie and the Blowfish) dressed in an elaborately embroidered and sequined cowboy-style Nudie suit reminiscent of the costumes worn by 1940s singing cowboy Roy Rogers.¹ Accompanying himself on an acoustic guitar (and further backed up by unseen musicians playing a pedal steel guitar, bass, and drums), Rucker begins to sing: “When my belly starts a-rumblin’ and I’m jonesin’ for a treat, I close my eyes for a big surprise: the Tender Crisp Bacon Cheddar Ranch.” Rucker borrows his tune from “The Big Rock Candy Mountain,” a work most recently popularized by the film O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000). There, the song helps to establish the film’s geographical and chronological setting (that is, the rural United States in the 1930s), and to associate the film’s trio of protagonists—characters whose flight from a chain gang is accompanied by the song—with the innocent simplicity and fantastical, aspirational optimism portrayed in “The Big Rock Candy Mountain.”

Rucker’s rendition of the song functions similarly at first: along with the spot’s grayscale chromatic spectrum and Rucker’s archaic clothing, the tune of “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” buttresses the ad’s nostalgic flavor. Of course, the commercial’s historical allusions are not as straightforward as those of O Brother; the song suggests the early decades of the twentieth century, Rucker’s costume evokes the 1940s, and Rucker (as “Hootie”) was himself an iconic figure of the 1990s. This retroactive collapsing of pre-2001 US history into an innocent, prosperous singularity reflects an impulse among many Bush-era Americans to regard September 11, 2001, as a firm dividing line between on one hand the economic, political, and emotional turmoil and uncertainty of the current century, and on the other hand the illusory safety, plenitude, and confidence of the past. Though his costuming and the tune he sings most strongly connote earlier periods of national and international crisis, Rucker’s temporally specific presence overwhelms and assimilates these elements, resulting in an aura of vague past-ness that seems reminiscent of the security, prosperity, and comfort of 1990s America.² That Rucker’s clothing resembles that of Roy Rogers—a figure whose own blend of urban opulence and rural approachability helped to reassure a USA that was in the process of recovering its self-confidence and redefining its role in the world—helps to cement the positive aura of the spot’s opening and to deemphasize the harsh realities of both the past and the present. Similarly, the most familiar topics of “The Big Rock Candy Mountain”—simplicity, imagination, and especially utopia—are far stronger here than any connotations of want or uncertainty.

As Rucker sings the words “close my eyes,” the scene shifts into exaggeratedly vivid color and his song shifts into a recitation of fanciful, mostly sandwich-oriented images:³

I love the Tender Crisp Bacon Cheddar Ranch, The breasts, they grow on trees And streams of bacon-ranch dressing Flow right up to your knees, There’s tumbleweeds of bacon And cheddar paves the streets Folks don’t ’front you ’cause you got the juice, There’s a train of ladies comin’ with a nice caboose, Never get in trouble, never need an excuse, That’s the Tender Crisp Bacon Cheddar Ranch.

As Rucker sings each lyrical image, heavily made-up and garishly costumed actors using similarly exaggerated props enact it. The ad takes full advantage of the sexual double-meanings of the images: as we hear “the breasts, they grow on trees,” a woman dressed in a bust-emphasizing blouse arches her back and brings a sandwich to her mouth as the camera slowly zooms in toward her breasts; two women wearing stylized Victorian undergarments dance in front of a mountain oozing a white substance that resembles semen (the women carry overflowing buckets of the liquid, which they taste) as Rucker...