HOBO JIM, "Alaska's State Balladeer," has turned a love of the great outdoors into a great music career
By Erik Philbrook
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Hobo Jim |
There are some songwriters who write about the life they want to live. Then there are songwriters like Alaska's Hobo Jim, who live the life they want to have and then write about it. Today, Hobo Jim, who has spent most of his adult life in Alaska chronicling his experiences in song, is a beloved musical icon. As Alaska celebrates its 50 th anniversary as a state, Jim was asked to write a song commemorating the occasion. His work, "I Am Alaska," couldn't possibly have been written by any other songwriter.
Leaving home as a young man, Jim hitchhiked around the country, rode freight trains and eventually headed to Alaska where he found work as a commercial fisherman, a logger and as a cowboy. "I couldn't leave," he says. "I absolutely fell in love with the beauty and the people up here. I still feel the same."
Jim, an avid hunter and fisherman, began writing and singing songs almost exclusively about the Alaskan lifestyle and the backwoods. And it caught on.
Jim has performed with Reba McEntire, Ricky Skaggs, Mark Chesnutt, Sam Bush, Bela Fleck and many more of country music's biggest names. To date, he has recorded six albums as well as three children's records, and has gained a wide audience that stretches from his home state to other "big-sky" states such as Idaho, Arizona and Missouri as well as in Europe, where audiences appreciate an authentic American musical hero when they hear one. Jim says he was "raised on the music of Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams and Rambling Jack Elliot," so it is no surprise that his music evokes the spirit of those genuine American troubadours. His songs have also been recorded by the likes of George Jones, Randy Travis, Lee Roy Parnell and many others.
After having been featured in Peter Jenkin's bestselling book Walk Across America and after having been named "Alaska's State Balladeer" in 1994 by the state legislature and governor of Alaska, Hobo Jim, who is currently working on a new recording, remains grounded in what he loves. "I sing to fish," he says. " I work in the evening, but no matter where I'm working, I have something outdoorsy that I can do. I get to combine hunting and fishing with playing for people."
