A month into their travels together, tensions between Ledbetter and Lomax are reaching a breaking point. In Montgomery, they record at Kilby Prison, where the Scottsboro “boys” are being held; later, Lomax will write and perform a song to aid their defense. Later in Montgomery, an argument pushes Ledbetter to walk away from Lomax, and their future together seems uncertain. Lomax is working to secure a place for himself and his “discovery” at the annual meeting of the prestigious Modern Language Association, to be held in Philadelphia in late December, and is relieved when Ledbetter re-emerges, ready to try again.

Chapter Seven focuses on African-American representations of transiency. Black transients suffered from the same problems of poverty and hunger as whites but they had to contend with the added problems of racial discrimination and state-sanctioned violence. They were also, to varying degrees, barred from hobohemian subculture. Black transients were entirely excluded, for example, from the publishing market for book-length hobo memoirs. This chapter seeks out representations of transiency in black vernacular music, particularly, though not exclusively, the blues. I argue that examining the lyrical content of black vernacular music changes the cultural representation of the hobo because blues is more sexually explicit, contains more examples of female empowerment, and places a stronger emphasis on the road as a place of violence than do white written accounts. The romanticisation of the road that is common in white hobo memoirs is largely absent from black vernacular music, in which concerns about needing to leave town, often to escape an awkward romantic situation but sometimes to escape from the violence of the railroad police, loom large.