In a recent diary, BooMan wrote:
“[Bruce] Springsteen, it seems to me, is Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, and Johnny Cash all wrapped up into one. But he really isn’t quite as anti-establishment as his mentors. That’s probably why I love him the best of the four.”
That’s an interesting comment on Springsteen, one that I think is worth further exploration. I’m going to try and give it a shot in this essay.
First, in comparing Springsteen to Guthrie, Dylan, and Cash, BooMan forgets – I assume only momentarily – to include one more populist songwriting giant who so obviously is a major influence on the Boss: the one and only Pete Seeger. Seeger’s influence is most clearly felt in Springsteen’s tribute album to the great man, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions. But as I’ll discuss later in this essay, their musical connection runs much deeper than that.
What’s more, the 93-year old Seeger and Springsteen appear to have a close personal relationship today, with Seeger seemingly passing his mantle as unofficial “Bard Laureate” of the American people to Springsteen at the celebratory concerts surrounding President Obama’s inauguration. Indeed, I’d argue that one of the top 2 or 3 most moving moments to the American left of the whole, historic inaugural affair was Springsteen singing, alongside Seeger and his grandson Tao, “This Land Is Your Land” at the concert. Often thought of as our “true” national anthem by many on the left (including myself), Seeger made sure to include “This Land Is Your Land’s” so-called “forbidden” socialist verses in the performance, thereby paying tribute to the politics of the song’s composer, and previous “Bard Laureate”, Woody Guthrie.
(On a personal note, I think I’ve watched that clip at least 50 times in the 3 1/2 years since Obama’s inauguration, and without fail it brings tears to my eyes. The persona, the setting, the diverse yet primarily black choir, Tao’s soaring harmonies, and of course the presence of the soon-to-be first black President and his beautiful family, hits me in the gut like almost nothing else from that time. And I don’t think it’s projection to say that millions of others felt the same way when the concert aired. I believe it will be remembered as one of the great moments in our nation’s history.)
Here’s another heartfelt Bruce performance of “This Land Is Your Land” from the 1985 Born in the U.S.A. tour:
So, that clarifies BooMan’s initial point – Guthrie, Dylan, Cash, and Seeger are Bruce Springsteen’s spiritual godfathers. This leads to a second and more relevant question: BooMan says that “the Godfathers” are all more “anti-establishment” than Springsteen, presumably in both their music, and in their cultural notoriety and political positions. Yet does this notion stand up to close inspection? Let me try to answer that by comparing each of the individual Godfathers to Springsteen, in order.
* Guthrie. Here, I have to admit that although I enormously respect and admire Woody Guthrie’s contributions to our cultural consciousness, I don’t personally care for his songs (I know – might as well give up and subscribe to National Review now, right?). I find them musically unimaginative, Guthrie’s voice weak and reedy, and his melodies – with, of course, the landmark, hall-of-fame melodic genius of “This Land is Your Land” excepted – forgettable. See, think of Woody Guthrie song, say “The Grand Coulee Dam” or “Hard, It Ain’t Hard” or “Talking Dustbowl Blues”. Can you hum any of those songs off the top of your head? Nope? Me either. I guess if you put a knife to my throat I could do a few bars of “Worried Man Blues”. Maybe “Roll On, Columbia” too. That’s about it.
But even if Guthrie was a mediocre musician – can that really be disputed? – he was at the same time one of the most innovative and devastatingly direct lyricists in the poetic American grain. It is hard to imagine now, but Guthrie’s story-songs of the hardscrabble and often cruel lives of the working class of the 1930’s almost singlehandledly created (at least, with an assist by Guthrie’s contemporary, novelist John Steinbeck) the “Okie” archetype that had such a powerful hold on the sympathies of the New Dealers. Guthrie’s sad stories of the Okies were part of his larger narrative tapestry about the hopes, dreams, and hardships of the “common” men and women of America. Prior to Guthrie, these people were usually portrayed in popular culture as faceless masses, their lives not worthy of individual attention. Guthrie’s songs changed all that by implicitly (implicit, by the very existence of the songs) arguing that the lives of ordinary folks deserved just as much dignity, respect, and celebration as the great figures of the era. Their experiences were just as significant as those of the presidents, kings and queens, titans of business, and generals who ruled the world. That this belief – the life of every individual is of equal value to every other one – is at the heart of the progressive movement today is no coincidence. America was primed to accept it in significant part by the songs of Woody Guthrie. For this enormous achievement, Guthrie is rightfully celebrated today.
Guthrie’s influence on Springsteen is of course profound. Springsteen himself captured this well in his March 2012 South by Southwest keynote address:
Springsteen conceded that he had no interest in becoming a resurrection of Woody Guthrie, who never had a hit record or a platinum disc. “I liked the luxuries and comforts of being a star,” he told the capacity crowd in the Convention Center ballroom. But after reading Joe Klein’s “Woody Guthrie: A Life” in his early 30s, the Boss felt he’d obtained a strategy for shaping the form he loved — pop music — into something that could address grown-up problems.
According to Springsteen, he’d first fallen for the stories — and the hard stoicism — of country music. But even as he was attracted to the fatalism of country artists like Hank Williams and Jerry Lee Lewis, he found something toxic about those singers’ resignation to cruel fate. The Boss wanted an answer to the implicit question posed in Williams’ “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It”: why, he wondered, were hard times permanent for working men and women? In Guthrie’s work, he found a way forward: “fatalism tempered by a practical idealism,” and a conviction that “speaking truth to power wasn’t futile.”
Springsteen’s body of work is similar in scope to Guthrie’s, in that Springsteen has long focused his songwriting on the trials of ordinary people. But Springsteen’s songs emerged in a very different political climate from Guthrie’s, one which, over the course of Springsteen’s career, has seemed to grow endlessly worse for the American left. Thus, while Guthrie narrated a great, rising, working-class, economic-populist tide that eventually led to the largest and most prosperous middle class in history, Springsteen has been forced to bear witness to the slo-mo destruction of that same middle class. And indeed, in retrospect, both of these socioeconomic shifts came to fruition in roughly the same amount of time, about 40 years.
But how far does Guthrie’s political influence on Springsteen truly go? Was Guthrie politically braver than Springsteen? Are his songs truly more “anti-establishment” than The Boss’s? I think the answer to the third question has to be yes. Guthrie’s entire body of work is inseparable from his desire to resist conforming to, and to ultimately change, a society he felt was massively unjust. A random sampling of Guthrie’s lyrics confirms this. Guthrie was a man who wrote, in “Dirty Overalls”:
Well, I’ll give you my sweat
I’ll give you my blood
And I’ll give you your bread and your wine.
Before I’d be any man’s slave,
I would rot down in my grave.
And you can lay me down in my dirty overalls.
When Jesus come to town, all the working folks around
Believed what he did say
But the bankers and the preachers, they nailed Him on the cross,
And they laid Jesus Christ in his grave.
It’s always we rambled, that river and I
All along your green valley, I will work till I die
My land I’ll defend with my life if it be
Cause my pastures of plenty must always be free.
As these three verses show, Guthrie consistently framed his core concerns about economic injustice in life-and-death terms. That’s no surprise, given that Guthrie spent two decades of his relatively short life traveling – or “ramblin'”, as he put it – alongside the poor, hungry, and sometimes destitute men and women of America. He saw firsthand how the Depression shattered thousands of families, and caused the lives of the American working poor to go from tough but manageable, to impossibly difficult. Hal Ashby’s 1976 Guthrie biopic “Bound for Glory” (which is most notable for Haskell Wexler’s incredible photography, rather than Ashby’s hamhanded direction or David Carradine’s catatonic performance) does a great job visualizing Guthrie’s journey:
Clearly, an artist operating from Guthrie’s point-of-view was not disposed to “pro-establishment” ideas of any kind. Guthrie certainly believed in the dream of America – see, again, “This Land Is Your Land” if you have any doubt about that – but he was profoundly disgusted by the American reality of the 1930’s and early 1940’s, when his songwriting talent peaked. Guthrie’s well-documented association with the Communist Party USA further underscores this (and it provides me with an excuse to include this link to the current Communist Party of Oklahoma – can you imagine a more uphill battle?).
How does Guthrie’s anti-establishment stance compare to Springsteen’s? Well, this diary is already running long, so I’ll save a deeper discussion of Springsteen for the next part. But for now, I’ll say that Springsteen – perhaps because he came of age during the height of the American middle class – is, like the white working class today, more firmly tied to “establishment” ideas of America than Guthrie was. In the 1930’s, with America seemingly on the edge of social collapse, and as-yet no welfare state to serve at its bulwark, Guthrie and his audience simply had less to lose in calling for a wholesale overhaul of American society. On the other hand, Springsteen and his audience can still remember a time of relative prosperity and safety for the American middle class, to which they long to return in some form.
Thus, Guthrie was a revolutionary of sorts, while Springsteen is more of a reformist by nature. Guthrie belonged to no conventional political party, but Springsteen has actively supported Democratic politicians with his money and time for many years (sorry, Chris Christie). Guthrie seems to have believed only in massive change coming from outside the establishment, while Springsteen, even today, holds onto the idea of national renewal through traditional political institutions.
Ok, I’ll leave you with two more videos – the first one is Springsteen singing a lovely version of Guthrie’s “I Ain’t Got No Home,” one of his most tragic and heartbreaking songs.
Through all that pain, Springsteen still manages to leave you with a little crumb of hope that no matter how low-down, how tough, how cruel things get, somehow we’ll manage to make it through. I think Bruce feels that way, too.
Then check out Bob Dylan and the Band’s cover:
Pretty different, huh? But just as I cool, I think. I’ll talk about Bob next!