Considering History: We’re Living in, and Need to Live Up to, Bruce Springsteen’s America

This series by American studies professor Ben Railton explores the connections between America’s past and present.

On September 23, Bruce Springsteen, my favorite American artist and one of the most thoughtful models for studying America, turns 76. This birthday falls amidst one of the most prolific periods of the Boss’s more than 50-year recording career: In anticipation of Deliver Me From Nowhere, the upcoming film biopic that depicts Springsteen’s work and life during his recording of the 1982 album Nebraska, he’s about to release a five-LP boxed set featuring numerous recordings, outtakes, remasters, and even a film from the Nebraska sessions; and that follows his June release of Tracks II: The Lost Albums, a nine-LP collection that features seven previously unreleased, complete albums of Springsteen music.

Among those seven newly released albums is one that has instantly moved toward the top of the very competitive list of my favorite Springsteen records. That album, Inyo, was written and recorded during Springsteen’s 1995-1997 tour for The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995), already a longstanding favorite album of mine. These two complementary 1990s albums highlight striking ways Springsteen both foreshadowed the worst of where America has gone over the last few decades, but also modeled crucial ways we can resist those trends and move closer to our collective ideals.

Long before the financial crises of the 21^st century and the broader narratives of economic anxiety that have shaped much of our recent politics, The Ghost of Tom Joad made clear that the booms of the 1990s weren’t the reality for many Americans. The first lines of the album’s first song, its title track, are “Men walking along the railroad tracks/Going someplace and there’s no going back,” quickly followed by “Shelter line stretching around the corner/Welcome to the new world order.” And on the song “Youngstown” Springsteen makes clear that those desperate times are due in no small measure to entire American communities being abandoned by the kinds of end of the 20^th century changes that have only been amplified in the first decades of the 21st century, such asndustries moving abroad, the social safety net and public education being defunded, flight from shared urban spaces, and more.

If such losses of community and hope comprise one throughline for The Ghost of Tom Joad, another is its bracing portrayal of the immigrant experience in late 20^th century America. Both “Sinaloa Cowboys” and “Balboa Park,” two of Springsteen’s most tragic songs, depict young men who immigrate from Mexico to the Southwestern United States in pursuit of both sustenance and the chance at a better life for themselves and their families, but ultimately find exploitation, violence, and death instead. And “Galveston Bay” uses the interconnected history of post-Vietnam War refugees and the Ku Klux Klan’s white supremacist domestic terrorism to remind us that these tragedies for immigrants to the U.S. are neither new nor accidental.

Sinaloa Cowboys (Uploaded to YouTube by Bruce Springsteen)

A number of the songs on Inyo extend and deepen those depictions of the realities of the immigrant experience in the U.S. In particular, two of its most beautiful songs, “The Lost Charro” and “El Jardinero (Upon the Death of Ramona),” focus on Hispanic immigrants who have had to sacrifice essential elements of their heritage (the charro, who has traded his traditional cultural role for that of a migrant laborer) and family (the jardinero, who has lost his beloved daughter but can only mourn her through continuing his work as a gardener for wealthy families) in order to survive.

El Jardinero (Upon the Death of Ramona) (Uploaded to YouTube by Bruce Springsteen)

But what Inyo most powerfully adds to Tom Joad’s depiction of these painful 1990s realities is a reminder of how deeply rooted those issues are in American history. It does so especially through the stunning title track, which traces the history of Los Angeles through Southern California’s defining battles over water and land. The song’s speaker and his family worked for the money men who brought water to L.A., doing so not just by drastically altering the landscape, but also by displacing communities like the Paiute Native American tribe. He notes that all he did was in service of “the power, the water, the prosperity, and for the men with the money in the end.” And the song closes with a particularly bracing foreshadowing of our recent spate of catastrophic wildfires: “Tonight the Santa Ana’s drawing west across the Mojave/Blowin’ fire and dust onto L.A. County windowsills.”

Inyo (Uploaded to YouTube by Bruce Springsteen)

While Inyo links the worst of our history to its divisive legacies in the present, it also offers the possibility of more positive reconnections with the past. A particularly beautiful example of that theme is “The Aztec Dance,” featuring the character of Teresa, an indigenous Mexican American high schooler who complains to her mother that “Ma, they call us greaser, they call us wetback, here in this land that once was ours.” Her mother responds by telling her daughter a story that connects Teresa’s performance of the song’s titular traditional dance to their heritage and of the legacies of the past in the present: “Montezuma and Cuauhtémoc are in their graves/And our people of the valley of Mexico, well, they were enslaved/City gone and left in ruins, they cry bitter tears in another world/But here in this world, my daughter, they have you.”

The Aztec Dance (Uploaded to YouTube by Bruce Springsteen)

Inyo ends with “When I Build My Beautiful House,” a moving tribute to how the human spirit perseveres and holds onto dreams of a better future despite the past horrors and present challenges chronicled by much of the album. While that song’s speaker could be from any community, it nicely complements the more specific situation of the speaker in Tom Joad’s most lyrical song, “Across the Border.” That speaker takes his journey “somewhere across the border” not only to find “where pain and memory have been stilled,” but also because of the better future he knows defines him and his community at their best: “For what are we/Without hope in our hearts/That someday we’ll drink from God’s blessed waters/And eat the fruit from the vine/I know love and fortune will be mine/Somewhere across the border.”

Across the Border (Uploaded to YouTube by Bruce Springsteen)

The most inspiring moment on either of these albums is one that’s grounded in the worst of our past but also embodies the best of our collective ideals. The aforementioned “Galveston Bay” tells the stories of two Texas men, Vietnamese War soldier turned refugee Lee Bin Son and U.S. Vietnam vet Billy Sutter. The two are competing shrimp fishermen on the Gulf Coast, and Billy initially joins with the KKK in its attempts to “burn the Vietnamese boats into the sea.” Lee fights back, killing two Klan members, and Billy vows revenge. But in the song’s final verse and chorus, Billy makes a different choice:

One late summer night Lee stood watch along the waterside
Billy stood in the shadows, his k-bar knife in his hand
And the moon slipped behind the clouds

Lee lit a cigarette, the bay was still as glass
As he walked by Billy stuck his knife into his pocket
Took a breath and let him pass

In the early darkness Billy rose up
Went into the kitchen for a drink of water
Kissed his sleeping wife, headed into the channel
And cast his nets into the water of Galveston Bay

Galveston Bay (Uploaded to YouTube by Bruce Springsteen)

Those final lines echo an earlier description of Lee: “In the morning ‘fore the sun came up/He’d kiss his sleeping daughter/Steer out through the channel/And cast his nets into the water.” Ultimately “Galveston Bay” depicts the power of empathy and solidarity, of recognizing that all these individuals and communities, these stories and histories, are part of a shared America. Listening to both of these 1990s Springsteen albums makes clear how far we still have to go toward that more perfect union — and offers models through which we might just do so.