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Submitted to Portside
Springsteen’s “We Shall Overcome” Tour: A New Surge of
People’s Culture — And Progressive Politics
By Mark Solomon
Three hours before the start of Bruce Springsteen’s
first US concert in tribute to Pete Seeger, the huge
parking lot around the suburban Boston arena was
already gorged with scores of tailgate parties that had
gathered from all over the eastern seaboard. The core
of the crowd seemed pretty much the same as
Springsteen’s rock following. It was overwhelmingly
white, made up of largely suburban working and middle
class women and men from their thirties to their
early fifties. For more than a generation those fans
had embraced Springsteen’s buoyantly desperate bar
songs, his paeans to restless youth “born to run” from
spiritually empty suburban lives as well as songs about
the crushing weight of abandoned rust belt factories
and the devastating impact of lost jobs and lost dreams
upon working class families.
Beyond that traditional core of fans were atypical
smatterings of older people and families with small
kids drawn to Springsteen’s homage to Pete Seeger’s
kaleidoscope of folk music. Release of the “We Shall
Overcome” album a month before the tour had already
prepared the crowd for a departure from Springsteen’s
standard rock show. But the sheer power of seventeen
live musicians blasting away from a back porch set with
accordions, fiddles, washboards, banjoes, steel
guitars, and blowsy horns backing the stomping,
shouting rock star was enormous.
True to Seeger’s devotion to the breadth of the
country’s multicultural traditions, the concert ranged
over outlaw ballads, dustbowl songs, sea chanteys,
gospel, work songs, political songs, Cajun Zydeco,
mariachi, polka, New Orleans jazz, soul, even World War
II jitterbug. That triggered thoughts about Pete’s love
of country that deigns to celebrate its wealth and
power, but rather is devoted to its rich, diverse
people’s culture. Recognizing that historically much of
the spiritual – and financial – support for music
from the country’s soul came from the left, one was
reminded about how vapid and ignorant are the recent
claims of some that the left is deficient in
patriotism.
The “We Shall Overcome” album had folk, gospel and
social movement songs from the African American musical
tradition. But black musicians were absent. The touring
“Seeger Sessions” band corrected that indefensible
omission. Four top African American musicians and
singers led by vocalist Marc Anthony Thompson visibly
affirmed the inseparably multinational and multiracial
character of Pete’s art.
Two thematically timely and politically impacting songs
not on the album were added to the tour list. Blind
Alfred Reed’s indictment of racism and impoverishment,
“How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?” was
written at the onset of the Great Depression.
Springsteen added lyrics reflecting his response to the
“unbelievable devastation” that he recently witnessed
in New Orleans:
Tell me, how can a poor man stand such times and live?
There’s bodies floatin’ on Canal and the levees gone to
Hell
I got family scattered from Texas all the way to
Baltimore
And I ain’t got no home in this world no more
Gonna be a judgment that’s a fact, a righteous train
rollin’ down this track
Tell me, how can a poor man stand such times and live?
The second significant addition was Seeger’s updated
anti-Vietnam War song from 1965 with searing relevance
today: “(If You Love Your Uncle Sam) Bring ‘Em Home.”
Introduced by Springsteen as an appropriate theme for
Memorial Day, the audience responded with applause and
cheers. Two pivotal political and moral issues of the
time were addressed with humanity and art: Katrina and
Iraq. Along with the 1815 Irish antiwar ballad “Mrs.
McGrath” and a mournful, yet hopeful rendering of “When
the Saints Go Marching In” along with Thompson,
Springsteen manifested his growing maturity as an
artist and political thinker. Neither hectoring his
audience nor pandering, and with an economy of words,
he managed to convey tragedy, urgency and hope for
change.
Much has been written recently about the upsurge of
protest in popular culture. From the Dixie Chicks who
won’t back down, to Pink who wrote a lacerating letter
to Bush, to Neil Young who wants to impeach him, to Mos
Def and a growing array of hip hop poets and rappers
who increasingly voice their determination to fight
within society and within themselves the scourges of
racism, sexism, violence and oppression, and many more.
All such political art is nurtured by a latent and
increasingly manifest progressive majority and in turn
strengthens that majority.
But little has been said about the impact of popular
culture’s protest on the mindset of audiences. At the
Springsteen concert, an unscientific observation
suggested that Greater Boston’s ample peace and justice
community was not there. Yet, an audience most likely
not engaged in day-to-day activism reacted to “We Shall
Overcome” and the panoply of music celebrating work,
joy and struggle with affirming warmth and
appreciation. With apologies for repetitive
strategizing, all that underscores not only a changing
national mood (while the right, of course, remains
powerful, cunning and very dangerous), but also the
potential for productive engagement by organized
progressive forces with ever-broader publics.
It’s unfortunate and unfair that access to such
significant cultural events is undermined by outrageous
ticket prices. Let’s hope the artists and their fans
start slugging it out with promoters, ticket agencies
and whomever else is responsible for those prices so
that those events become accessible to more socially,
racially and nationally diverse audiences. In the
meantime, if the Seeger Sessions Band comes to your
neighborhood and you are able to attend, perhaps you
might consider bringing along some leaflets. You’ll get
a positive response.
_______________________________________________________
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“Our German forbearers in the 1930s sat around, blamed their rulers, said ‘maybe everything’s going to be alright.’ That is something we cannot do. I do not want my grandchildren asking me years from now, ‘why didn’t you do something to stop all this?” –Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst of 27 years, referring to the actions and crimes of the Bush Administration