For more than thirty years now, Bruce Springsteen's calling card has been what we might call "workingman's rock and roll."
Springsteen has always imagined himself as a spokesman for the ordinary blue-collar working Joe, singing out the heartbreak of the fading American Dream in the decaying Rust Belt cities of the United States' old industrial heartland. Springsteen is a natural storyteller, creating vivid characters in his songs, filling their hard lives with unforgettable details.
And those characters all seem to occupy a similar space on the desperate margins of American life.
(1) There's the kid in "The River" who gets his girlfriend pregnant:
And for my 19th birthday, I got a union card and a wedding coat
We went down to the courthouse and the judge put it all to rest
No wedding day smiles, no walk down the aisles, no flowers, no wedding dress.
(2) There's the desperate scammer of "Atlantic City," hoping that he can escape his problems by doing just one shady job for Mob-connected gambling bosses:
I been looking a job but it's hard to find
Down here it's just winners and losers and don't get caught on the wrong side of that line
Well I'm tired of coming out on this losing end
So honey last night I met this guy and I'm gonna do a little favor for him.
(3) There's the "Johhny 99" condemned murderer:
Well Judge, Judge, I had debts no honest man could pay
The bank was holding my mortgage, they were gonna take my house away
Now I ain't saying that makes me an innocent man
But there was more to all this that put that gun in my hand.
(4) In "My Hometown," there's the wistful native son:
Now Main Street's whitewashed windows and vacant stores
Seems like there ain't nobody wants to come down here no more
They're closing down the textile mill across the railroad tracks
Foreman says these jobs are going, boys, and they ain't coming back.
These are Springsteen's people, hardworking ordinary folks whose worlds are crashing down around them, usually due to forces outside their own control. If John Steinbeck was the voice of the Dust Bowl, then Springsteen is the bard of the Rust Belt.
And it's no accident that Springsteen once released an album called The Ghost of Tom Joad.
Wherever a factory is shuttered, a union man loses his job, or a Main Street shop closes its doors for the last time, Springsteen is there. Wherever the American Dream is hanging on by the most tenuous of threads, Springsteen is singing songs of hope and sorrow.