‘A short-handled shovel, right, is a shovel. And get this… it’s handle is short!’
I thought I’d get that out of the way at the beginning. The folk tune Big Rock Candy Mountain contains the lyric, ‘There ain’t no short handled shovels.’ What exactly is the significance of a ‘short-handled shovel’? Some sort of punishment? (The line follows one about a jail.) Or is it a specific tool for a particularly hard job, where a long-handled shovel can’t be used? Maybe it’s like the ‘short straw’, and the loser has to use the shovel with less leverage?
No cite that the song is necessarily is talking about this aspect of shovels, but…
A short-handled shovel is nice if you’re moving material from high to low (wheel barrow to ground), but backbreaking if you’re trying to dig a hole. Around my house, we’ve got one of each, and if two people are working, well… someone’s getting the short shovel.
I always figured that’s what the song was talking about: digging holes or trenches with the wrong tool.
Short handled shovels are less efficient for moving lots of dirt, but they’re lighter and easier to use in small spaces. If you’re working all day moving dirt you’ll kill your back with a short-handled shovel
Plus, the jail reference is a nice jail, which you can easily break out of and you don’t have to do any work and can sleep all day. So, short-handled shovel = back breaking work, which you don’t have to do at that jail.
Indeed, and during the Great Depression the men using them would have been using WWI surplus entrenching tools. Great if you are a soldier and your life is on the line and you need any shovel, but awful to use regularly.
They’re really the only tool that will work for a narrow, deep hole that you’re standing in. The blade on a long handled shovel cannot be brought to the horizontal with a long handled shovel in a deep, narrow hole.
In the context of the song, it simply means life is easy, even in prison, where hard labor is not requires. “Short handle shovels” just adds three syllables to match the meter of the verse.
Short handled-shovels are a punishment to the laboring prisoners to make their already-hard job even harder. Having a short-handle means the prisoner has to bend and stoop to use the implement. Also, having a short handle means the leverage you might get with a longer handle isn’t there, causing the prisoner to have to exert more energy to get the same amount of work done. A job that would be relatively easy with a long handled shovel is made very difficult with a short-handled shovel.
The song does NOT say that “life is easy, even in prison”…it says quite the opposite. It says life is hard and this man dreams of a life that is easier with blind railroad bulls, dogs with rubber teeth, jails made of tin, alcohol trickling down the mountain and a lake of stew. His life is so hard and unpleasant as a tired, hungry, vagrant hobo that these are his fantasies.
Soldiers are issued short spades because it will fit on their personal gear. Long-handled shovels are found amongst the equipment train of the engineering troops.
You can use a short handled shovel at the coal face, in any tunnel pipe or trench , … or off a conveyor or shelf … because the target material is in front of your chest or even above your shoulders.
But another aspect of the lyric is that you can do the easy or even enoyable work of tilling the garden with a long handled shovel, but there’s none of that unpleasant risky work such as in mines tunnels trenches … or where you are given bad equipment.
Let all them hounds off of their leashes,
Gave all that money to the rich,
They’re gonna hand you down now that short handed shovel
and direct you directly to the ditch.
The story I heard from my grandfather was that during the depression WPA workers tried to get to the job early to get one of the long handled shovels because they were easier to lean on while goofing off.
Short-handled agricultural impliments are dangerous to workers and inhumane under most circumstances. They were banned in California years ago. This was one of the reforms demanded by the United Farm Workers.
