Boondocks song written and produced by Joe South. It tells the story of a young man who laments that people put him down because he was born in the boondocks. He is in love with the boss man's daughter and vows to work slavishly until, one day, he can "move from this old shack" and fit in with her society. Throughout the song, he asks that the "Lord have mercy on the boy from down in the boondocks". Boondocks The boondocks is an American expression that stems from the Tagalog word "bundók" ("mountain"). It originally referred to a remote rural area,
Boondocks evolved into American slang used to refer to "the countryside" or any implicitly isolated rural/wilderness area, regardless of topography or vegetation. Similar slang or colloquial words are "the sticks", "the wops", "the backblocks", or "Woop Woop" in Australia and New Zealand, "bundu" in South Africa (etymologically unrelated to "boondocks" or "bundok"), and "out in the tules" in California. The diminutive "boonies" can be heard in films about the Vietnam War such as Brian De Palma's "Casualties of War "(1989) used by American soldiers to designate rural areas of Vietnam. "Down in the Boondocks" is a 1965 hit Billy Joe Royal