Bruce Springsteen - We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions (American Land Edition) (CD/DVD)
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Artist: Bruce SpringsteenBrand: Sony
Edition: Music CD
Audio: English (Unknown)
Format: Extra tracks, Special Edition
CD Release Date: 2006-10-03
Music Label: Sony
Soundtracks:
- Old Dan Tucker
- Jesse James
- Mrs. McGrath
- O Mary DonÂ?t You Weep
- John Henry
- Erie Canal
- JacobÂ?s Ladder
- My Oklahoma Home
- Eyes On The Prize
- Shenandoah
- Pay Me My Money Down
- We Shall Overcome
- Froggie Went A CourtinÂ?
- Buffalo Gals
- How Can I Keep From Singing
- How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times And Live (Bruce Springsteen Version)
- Bring Â?Em Home
- American Land
Music reviews of We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions (American Land Edition) (CD/DVD)
Music Review: I Hear America Singing
Rating: 5 Stars
Like Walt Whitman, it's the America of carpenters, mechanics and boatmen that greets the ear in this latest Bruce Springsteen effort. An older America, in the voices of the commonplaces of a shared past now forgotten by the old or never learned of by the young, rises in these songs to remind us of who we are, or were.
This is Springsteen's fourth album-length foray into folk music. Nebraska is regarded by many members of the Church of Springsteen as his best work; "The Ghost of Tom Joad," featuring his elegaic "Youngstown," won Bruce a Grammy as best new folk release in 1995. The spiritually-themed "Devils and Dust" topped the charts in 2005, with a title track exploring the psychological tension inherent in Iraq War ("We've Got God on our side...When I look into your eyes, all I see are devils and dust.") Bruce also covered Woodie Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land", released on his first live album, covering the years 1975-85. That effort was explicitly done, both by Guthrie, and by Springsteen, as he tells is, as a protest to Irving Berlin's patriotic offerings.
Bruce has been, since I was 16, nearly 30 years ago, unknowingly singing my and my family's autobiography in his music. Descended from a race of James Webb-esque blue-collar Joes, nearly all the men veterans, we could've stepped out of the lyrics of many of his songs. From "Adam Raised A Cain" to "Youngstown," he never lost his focus (the "Human Touch" years excepted) on Joe and how Joe was trying to make a living, get his girl, and about his love for cars and the freedom of being behind the wheel, with one's fate in one's own hands. Even the misunderstood Born In The USA has it's place in telling the story of people like us - it was penned as a protest against the indifferent treatment of returning Vietnam veterans. (Ironically, at the Vote For Change concert, with a more explicit theme behind the performance, the college kid in front of me still pumped his fist in the air in rythm with the music on "Born In The USA," either oblivious or uncaring of the meaning of his chosen expression of patriotic.) "My Hometown" resonates with me across two decades - from watching my father's job disappear in Detroit, circa 1980, to seeing the faces of factory workers today. (My job involves outplacement help for people facing layoff, much of it NAFTA/GATT-related).
As to why a paleoconsevative like myself should be interested in self-described Progressive Bruce Springsteen's latest foray into folk music, hardly renowned as a bastion of conservatism. Two reasons: His social commentary, set to music, often finds common ground with paleoconservative ideas. If the current causes that most unify us center on the Three I's (Immigration, Imports and Iraq), then the Boss is right on the latter two, and if the resurgence of a more traditional wing in the Democratic Party, personified in Bob Casey, Jr. and James Webb, is a harbinger of things to come, them we have common ground with a rising political movement. Secondly, and most importantly, for paleos, politics isn't everything, and everything isn't political. Springsteen's latest offering is traditional, rooted in the American experience, and generally has no overt politics about it. Springsteen famously rebuffed both the Reagan and Mondale campaigns in 1984, and prior to 2004's "Vote For Change" tour, had not, to my knowledge, made partisan endorsements. Even then, his "public service announcement" during the concert in Detroit (talking to his audience is a signature Springsteen item), he made his views known without hate, rancor or name-calling.
Springsteen is, well, different. Until I heard "Darkness on the Edge of Town" (the album featuring "Adam Raised A Cain"), I'd never heard a rock `n' roll song on the subject of the artist's father. Jobs, family life - the subject matter was adult, in a way that the Beach Boys, or nearly anyone this side of Johnny Cash, just couldn't be. Bruce grew up, personally and musically, and took us along for the ride, while other acts went grey, still singing about teenage angst. The Magic Rat, Rosalita, and the other characters who peopled the songs of his first albums, through his breakthrough Born To Run in 1975 gave way to first-person characters and their struggles to make it against the odds. Most of the songs left you wondering if they ever made it, but you knew that they were trying. And, in the midst of the despair that could make Bruce sing, You're born with nothing/And it's better off that way/Soon as you got something/They send someone to take it away he'd come back with, And I believe in the Promised Land on the same album. (And I still believe in the Promised Land, Bruce.)
"We Shall Overcome, American Land Edition" is Bruce's second offering on the same theme, the music of Pete Seeger, following the 2006 release of "We Shall Overcome, The Seeger Sessions," which offers a CD on one side and DVD on the other. The latter has live performances of five songs featured on the reverse, along with two bonus track ("Buffalo Gals," an Erie Canal-era song, plus the Civil War-era hymn "How Can I keep From Singing") and documentary about the making of the album.
Both versions began as a tribute to Pete Seeger, in whose honor one track was recorded in 1997 (for a tribute album), all the songs are live, unrehearsed and acoustic. Many of these songs I learned from Mrs. Watson, who was in her 50th year as a music teacher when I started elementary school in a working-class suburb of Detroit in the 1960s. When she retired, their words and melodies faded from ears of those who followed me. The next generation of kids grew up singing Boomer anthems from the 1960s (stuff by the Fifth Dimension, Joan Baez, etc.), and the thread linking them with the long-dead Americans who gave them their first life was severed. Until now. Springsteen is enough of an institution, over 30 years after simultaneously appearing on the covers of both Time and Newsweek, that whatever he does gets attention, and sells well. (the phenomenon has been given a name: `The Springsteen Effect.')
These songs resonated with me more than all the half-forgotten hits from my childhood years They make me feel like I'm home. Perhaps it's that they are part of America's fabric, in a way that music that is identified only with the generation that produced it can never be. Music for a season bows to music for all seasons.
Of the actual performances, the spontaneous harmony of each song is actually a wonder, given the unrehearsed, unedited nature of the recordings. Not that all is perfection; Shenandoah could've used clearer vocals from Bruce at a few points, and I'm not a fan of Jesse James as a subject for song, but I cannot fault the performance in that case. (I can fault trying to turn Jesse James into a latter-day Robin Hood, however, which the song bearing his name does.) The others range from very good to deeply moving ("We Shall Overcome" and "O Mary Don't You Weep"). All of the performances are of good-enough quality to make skipping any an act of self-denial. Let's hope that this is the first of a long line of resurrections of traditional American music - in itself, an act of spiritual and cultural patriotism that transcends the superficiality of most of what mass media feeds the masses daily.
This may be the first time, since national mass media became a reality via radio in the 1930s, (Richard Weaver's "Great Stereopticon," the techno-cultural megaphone that allows it's owner to nearly monopolize popular culture) that music has the potential for multigenerational appeal. I know that my late father liked some of these songs, and would've enjoyed this collection. "Shenandoah," "John Henry," "Jacob's Ladder" and "Froggie Went A Courtin'" are as old as the American soul.
Thus, after a long silence, America may have begin to find it's traditional voice again. I felt something similar while watching Ronald Reagan's funeral, listening to the classic music that he selected in advance for the inevitable good-bye. Peggy Noonan wrote about it, after both the Reagan and Ford funerals, asking why we don't hear more often our best American music, because it touches its hearers (of a certain age, at least) so deeply, except at State funerals and similar occasionsn. If a Presidental state funeral is High Church America, musically, then perhaps this collection of songs is its Low Church counterpart. That same longing for the permanent things, may be what drove the Boss, and drives his listeners, to embrace these old songs again.
Returning to the music itself, "Erie Canal" is actually, according to Bruce's liner notes, dates from 1905, not the 1820s, the heyday of canals, but it has more authenticity, as folk music, than the sanitized, pop variety popular in the 1960s (think the '90s movie "A Mighty Wind"). Several songs were actually hymns; without losing all their religious meaning, they are better known for their connection with the Civil Rights movement. "Eyes On The Prize" and "We Shall Overcom"e were, of course, signature pieces from that era, and most listeners doubtless remember them in that context, and not from Sunday mornings. "Pay Me My Money Down" is an old sea shantry, according to the liner notes, which gained new life on the lips of black stevedores in Charleston, in protest over being defrauded of their due by unscrupulous ship captains. Covered previously by The Kingston Trio and Jerry Garcia, the labor movement has also adopted it for their own. "Froggie Went A Courtin'" was on Scottish lips long before it came to our shores. (In addition to a Seeger rendition, it was covered by the artist Springsteen was compared to, early in his career - Bob Dylan) "Buffalo Gals" is a romp, and "How Can I Keep From Singing," done a cappella, could've come out of a Sunday morning service. "How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?" takes us back to a 1920's-era flood of New Orleans, without having to say anything about the present - the relevance is too obvious.
The '60's-ear anti-war "Bring `Em Home" preceeds the last cut, "American Land." Although framed in terms of the imagery of the generations who passed through Ellis Island, the song's presence here can be read, in the context of Springsteen's earlier works on Tom Joad, an endorsement of a more liberal immigration policy.
Best of all, it's obvious, in every song, that they were having fun, and it's fun to listen in. (If the semi-Randian heroics of "John Henry" doesn't lift your spirits, you're probably asleep.) I hope it's the start of something greater than itself, like the reclamation of the American soul from relativists, multiculturalists, and the rest of that crowd.
More We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions (American Land Edition) (CD/DVD) free music reviews:
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Description of We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions (American Land Edition) (CD/DVD)
A 40-minute film about the recording of the album with artist commentary. Includes filmed performances of:John Henry Pay Me My Money Down Buffalo Gals Erie Canal O Mary Don't You Weep Jacob's Ladder Froggie Went A Courtin' Shenandoah
Plus four bonus live tour videos:
How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times And Live (Bruce Springsteen Version) Bring 'Em Home American Land Pay Me My Money Down
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