“Hallelujah, I’m a Bum”

Hallelujah, I’m a Bum is one of the inherited songs sung by the younger generation of The Tribe, even though its words have become unintelligible to them. The song’s survival makes audible a central tension of the post-Disaster world: cultural forms can be repeated and enjoyed after their original meanings and contexts have been lost.

A song inherited without its meaning

The Tribe sings the song in unison, accompanied by the accordion’s standardized chords and bumping bass. The children do not know what a “bum” is, just as they sing about “Virginny” without knowing what or where it is, and sing of Barbara Allen without having known unrequited love. The words remain part of the performance, but no longer convey the experiences or references that gave them meaning.

The younger generation’s preference for singing rather than listening to the phonograph initially encourages Ish: they participate instead of remaining an audience. Yet their musical independence has limits. They do not go on to compose new tunes or words, and Ish’s occasional topical verses meet what he senses as resistance to a departure from tradition. The old songs are actively performed, but the inherited repertoire still sets the terms of what can be sung.

Sound, memory, and continuity

The song belongs to a repertoire in which simple tunes matter more to the singers than the words. Its persistence is therefore not evidence that the children remember the vanished world in detail. Rather, melody, rhythm, and collective performance carry a fragment of that world forward after its references have become opaque. The song can unite its singers without restoring the knowledge that once connected its words to particular places, people, or feelings.

That broken connection matters in a society where Ish increasingly understands time as more than counting. He comes to regard time as history, history as tradition, and tradition as part of civilization; without continuity, something valuable may be lost beyond recovery. The song shows one way continuity can survive imperfectly: a recognizable cultural form is handed on, even when its content is no longer understood.

Tradition made and remade

The Tribe’s songs exist alongside more deliberate acts of remembrance. Near San Lupo Drive, Ish marks the first full circuit of the sun by cutting a numeral into a smooth rock surface once used by an earlier people to pound acorns. He calls the mark Year One, while Em remembers the year by the baby born in it. Later, the community names a year for fishing after discovering the abundance of striped bass in the Bay. Such practices preserve time by attaching it to events and shared experience; the children’s song, by contrast, preserves sound while its verbal references fade.

These forms of inheritance are not simply intact relics. The annual naming ceremony gives the community a chance to select what it will remember, while the song’s repeated words continue without requiring the singers to recover their original sense. Together, they show tradition as both a thread of continuity and a process of change: the past persists, but later generations inhabit it differently.