Reviews

Review of Long Walk Home: Reflections on Bruce Springsteen edited by Jonathan D. Cohen and June Skinner Sawyers, by Prudence Jones

Contributors to BOSS

Contributors to BOSS

“Seeds Blowin’ Up the Highway in the South Wind”: Woody Guthrie’s Angry Sons and Daughters

Both anger and hope drive Woody Guthrie’s protest songs. Lyrics like “This Land Is Your Land” offer a hopefully angry voice that continues to be heard in the work of contemporary American singer-songwriters. This essay analyzes the ways in which Guthrie’s voice and vision continue to inform the songs of Bruce Springsteen, Steve Earle, Patty Griffin, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, and Mary Gauthier. By bringing Guthrie’s hopeful anger that insists on justice and mercy and precludes sentimentality, hostility, and nihilism into conversation with the artists who continue his legacy of activism, this paper looks to the “Seeds” Guthrie sowed.

Tradition and Originality in the Songs of Bruce Springsteen

Bruce Springsteen works within musical traditions in a way that acknowledges their influence and at the same time creates something new. This paper focuses on Springsteen’s relationship to the American folk tradition and the ways in which he creates a dialogue with that tradition in order to offer his own distinct perspective. By looking at Springsteen’s lyrics and their intertexts, we can appreciate how he engages the tradition and transforms it. Ultimately, his audience makes meaning from his songs by understanding them as part of a tradition, recognizing the earlier works that inform Springsteen’s lyrics, and considering both the effect the tradition has on Springsteen’s work and the effect Springsteen's work has on their understanding of that tradition.

Reviews

Reviews of The Grace of God and the Grace of Man by Azzan Yadin-Israel and Bruce Springsteen and Popular Music, edited by William I. Wolff.

Springsteen & I: A Documentary Analysis of Springsteen’s Fan Base

Music is an international code of interaction which allows listeners to enhance their knowledge of other countries and cultures. This paper offers a study of music fandom, of the ways in which people form special, sustained attachments to musical performers or genres. The focus for this study is to analyze the 2013 documentary, Springsteen & I through the lens of studies of fandom. This documentary is comprised of fan clips and, using this movie as a cultural artifact, we examine the documentary to see how Springsteen fans, both in the United States and internationally, employ their activities and experiences with the music of this artist.

Front Matter and Table of Contents

Title page, submission instructions, and table of contents

Bruce Springsteen as Post-Christian Pastor

This article explores how Bruce Springsteen embodies a North American/Western European twenty-first century religious sensibility that encompasses a secular outlook but is colored by the Christian tradition and is informed by biblical language, images, and ideals. Because Springsteen is able to give voice to an orientation to the world that resonates with the experiences, aspirations, and religious understanding of those who have grown up in the same world as him, Springsteen has become a pastoral/priestly figure to the extensive community that identifies with his work.

“Outlaw Pete”: Bruce Springsteen and the Dream-Work of Cosmic American Music

During the 2006 Seeger Sessions tour, Springsteen shared his deep identification with the internal struggle implied by old spirituals like “Jacob’s Ladder.” While the Magic album seemed to veer wide of the Seeger Sessions ethos, Working on a Dream re-engages mythically with what Greil Marcus would call “old, weird America” and Gram Parsons deemed “cosmic American music.” Working suggests the universe operates according to “cosmic” principles of justice, judgment, and salvation, but is best understood from the standpoint of what Freud would call “dream work” and “dream thoughts.” As unfolded in Frank Caruso’s illustrations for the picturebook alter ego of Working‘s “Outlaw Pete,” these dynamics may allude to Springsteen’s conflicted relationship with his father.

The Theological Virtues According to Bruce Springsteen

Bruce Springsteen’s relationship to his Roman Catholic background is complex and multifaceted. This paper seeks to analyze the artist’s understanding of the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love as seen in the album Wrecking Ball (2012). By juxtaposing Springsteen’s understanding of these virtues with Catholicism’s Thomistic tradition, scholars can see how he draws upon this tradition while creating a more robust role for the virtue of hope. This analysis of Springsteen’s engagement in a theological discourse around the virtues of faith, hope, and love offers a fuller understanding of the artist’s commitment to visions of the American Dream.