In 1929 Harry Partch rejected the standard twelve-note chromatic equal-tempered scale in favor of the mathematically pure system of just intonation, and began to build instruments to play in that system. Then he spent most of the next 12 years living as a migrant worker or hobo during the Depression. A letter from Chicago suggested an opportunity to get his music played, so Partch, as he later said, "[h]aving been through more than six years of California depression ... jumped at the chance to see some midwest depression." With $3.29 in his pockets, he hopped a freight in Oakland and rode it to Chicago, arriving there two weeks later on October 1, 1941, with a dime left.

However, he had kept a notebook of things he saw and things people said, and drew upon it two years later in writing U.S. Highball, his most ambitious work to that point. He wrote the work in Ithaca, New York, where some friends let him stay with them for nine months. It was originally composed for just voice and adapted guitar, but Partch soon felt that it needed more of his self-invented kithara and chromelodeon. He did not have these instruments with him, a fact that made the work's scoring tentative. At the end of the five weeks during which he wrote it, Partch received notification that he had been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and, for the first time in his career, a measure of financial security. He could now have the instruments shipped, and used them to prepare a second draft of the score. The first performance of the work was as part of a lecture-deminstration at Bennington College in Vermont, and there he played and sang U.S. Highball with adapted guitar only, however. He performed it that way a few more times within the next year, including at a League of Composers concert at the Carnegie Chamber Music Hall.

In 1955, Partch rescored the work, eliminating adapted viola and adding several new instruments he had invented in the meantime, mostly pitched percussion. He had hopes of making a film of the work in an avant-garde montage style, but these fell through. He recorded it on his Gate Five Records label, and grouped it with several other works originating (in subject) during his hobo years under the general title "The Wayward."

The central character is a young hobo named Mac, who travels from "Carmel, Californiel" through such places as "Winnemucca, Nevaducca" to "a-g,- o-ga,-a-ga, Chicago." The text consists only of fragments of conversation—advice on how to avoid the town where the railroad dicks have their training school, complaints that the engineer jerks the train dangerously, awed viewing of the northern lights, and a pervasive sense of boredom and nearly extinguished hope. Partch felt tremendous affection for this work, and it remains the one of the most direct and touching depictions of life at the very bottom of the economic depression in America.

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