Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Hobo Jim, as you may have guessed by now, is Alaska's very own personal folk singer,
except he also does “Jambalaya” about as well as anyone I've ever heard, and some
Dylan, and oh yeah, plays a little blues slide guitar while he's at it, and oh hell, I don't
think there's anything he can't play and play well. He's ubiquitous up here, an Alaskan
icon, to the point that about ten years ago the Alaska State Legislature named him the
Alaska State Balladeer. “That's the second highest honor I've had in my life,” he says.
“The first is that for thirty years people have been coming to my show. The other day a
young woman wanted my autograph and told me that when she was six years old she got
to come on stage with me at the Sluice Box and sing “The Iditarod Trail.” He shakes his
head and grins. “Not bad for a guy that's only 20.”
Well, he might be a few years older than that, as he brags about his twenty-second wed-
ding anniversary to Cindy coming up next month (“My wife and I have been together for
22 years, give or take a few nights on the couch”) and then he sings the song he wrote for
her, “The Beauty of You,” and a perennial crowd favorite.
Hobo Jim came to Alaska thirty years ago, after leaving home young and spending a lot
of time singing in bars and riding freight trains, where he got his moniker. “When I first
came to Alaska, everybody had a nickname, like Whiskey Bob; you didn't ever ask any-
body's last name.” Hobo Jim it was, and he spent some years logging and commercial
fishing. Then he got married. After a honeymoon at Barabara Creek, with the carcass of a
dead bear parked outside the tent, he brought Cindy home to his snowed-in cabin in
Homer. “It looked like something out of
Doctor Zhivago
,” he says. Then they ran out of
money. “I'd given up singing by then, so when I got the guitar out from under the bed and
told her I could always go make a few bucks singing in the bar, she laughed.”
He's been singing ever since.
Off stage, Hobo Jim is quiet of manner, modest, I'd say maybe even a little shy. On
stage, it's like he's mainlining lightning, pounding that right foot, banging on that guitar,
inciting the audience to riot during “The Earthquake Song” ('Is it love or just an earth-
quake?') “I'm the gig from hell, aren't I?” he says to the sound man, who is holding up a
decibel meter and shaking his head.
Hobo can't stand it, he's got to get everybody up on stage: 8-year old Chelsea to sing
“The Iditarod Trail,” fellow singer Ken Peltier, found most nights at the Four Corners Bar
