Well, well, and again well. It look like AI ain't that bad.

My artificial buddy Claude led me, eventually and with appropriate skepticism and not a little luck, to an article by Colin Johnson called "Casual Sex," all about - wait for it - hobo [sic] sexuality, in an academic tome entitled "Subaltern Citizens and Their Histories," ed. by Gyanandra Pandey (2010).

Johnson appears to have unearthed from the L. of C. the 1906 lyrics.

Here they are. I've improved only the spacing and added some commas and periods periods for readability:

On a very fine day in the month of May,
A burly bum he went out a hikin’;
On the very same day in the month of May
A farmer’s son was a pikin’;
Said the bum to the son
Won’t you come, oh, come to the big Rock Candy Mountains,
And I’ll show you the bees and the cigarette trees
And the soda water fountains.

Where the blue bird sings, ‘round the chicken soup springs,
And the soda water flows from the fountains,
And I’ll show you the bees and the cigarette trees,
In the big Rock Candy Mountains.

Said the son to the bum, for a farmer’s son,
It’s the sporty place to be a goin'.
If the cigarette trees wave in the breeze
Without the need of a hoe-in’.
So before it’s dark let us make a start
For the big Rock Candy Mountains,
And the place that you know, where the cigarettes grow,
By the ice-cream soda fountains.

Where the blue bird sings, ‘round the chicken soup springs,
And the soda water flows from the fountains,
From the cigarette trees smoke all we please,
In the big Rock Candy Mountains.

So the very same day in the month of May
The bum and the son they went a hikin,’
And the farmer’s son was a havin fun,
At the purty gals was a pikin’.
Said the bum to the son, there’ll be lots of fun,
As the mile posts they were counting,
For the girls all wear white stockings, I declare,
In the big Rock Candy Mountains.

Where the blue bird sings, ‘round the chicken soup springs,
And the soda water flows from the fountains,
And the girls we’ll squeeze by the cigarette trees,
In the big Rock Candy Mountains.

On the very same night, in a loud delight,
The farmer’s son he lay a snorin’
On a side-tracked train to the same refrain
The while the bum was a scorin’.
Good bye there’ll be fun for the farmer’s son,
When you wake at Bell-a-Fountain,
For your clothes and your shoes, I will drink up in booze,
While you dream of Candy Mountains.

Where the blue bird sings, ‘round the chicken soup springs,
And the soda water flows from the fountains,
That’s the end of the son and the rummy-dum dum
And the big Rock Candy Mountains.


"Piking" = seeing, looking "Rumdum" = a drunken tramp, a "rummy."

Unfortunately Johnson doesn't say explicitly that the published tune was the familiar one.

Locke-Tyner and McClintock bear obvious resemblances, but they likely both derive from a common source, perhaps only in fragments. Cf. also the 1925 Wichita Eagle text and Gordon's very similar but sexually explicit (in a line ir two) "Appleknocker's Lament" (collected in 1927).