When Harry Partch set out on his journeyman's adventure of securing a Guggenheim Fellowship, completing his proposed catalog of Depression-inspired works, and airing the results in the heady atmosphere of New York City, he carried the weight of his experiences scraping together a living through odd jobs across the western United States. His life as a hobo during the Depression consumed his plans and hopes for the future, but it also gave new direction to the thematic bases of his works and sparked a new, and even greater, period of creative success than he had enjoyed with his first Monophonic songs. From his journal Bitter Music, begun as he descended into the hobo jungles in 1935, to U.S. Highball, completed as he received salvation in the form of a Guggenheim in 1943, Partch made the characters he met and the words they spoke the centerpieces of his creative aspirations. He allied himself, through life and work, with a group that was fascinating to the broader American culture, one that was searching for the truth of its situation through media such as the documentary expressions of Dorothea Lange's photographs and The Grapes of Wrath.

This cultural fascination played a definitive role in Partch's acceptance in New York and his winning the Guggenheims that gave him time to compose, but how did his appropriation of the hobo image shape his subsequent career?