This is the story of a man who became a hobo out of necessity and remained one for its freedoms. It is the story of a composer who rejected the tenets of music as he found them and sought to return music to its roots. It is the story of American music, and how music reflects and reacts with the culture in which it lives. It is the story of Harry Partch and his music.

Two important questions frame this story: “Why Harry Partch?” and “Why hoboes?” Those questions entwine in all the scholarship and literature on this uniquely American composer. They inform reviews like Alex Ross's, of a production of Partch's version of Oedipus, where he proclaimed: “Of all the triumphantly weird characters who have roamed the frontiers of American art, none ever went quite as far out as the composer Harry Partch. His exit from civilization has assumed the status of legend, and it's all true.” And they stretch back to 1949, where, in his preface to the first edition of Partch's formative book Genesis of a Music, Otto Luening eloquently pinpointed why the hobo was crucial to any approach to the composer's music: