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Springsteen’s Long Wind-up: What Came Before the Ghost

Those who know only the red, white & blue album cover of Born in the U.S.A. might find it odd or problematic to stack Bruce Springsteen’s border songs next to that image. In fact, Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A, a huge commercial success, has more complexity in it than many notice or acknowledge. It’s easy to let the music dominate that album and miss the stories. And it’s easy to assume the 1984 album cover is at odds with the nuance heard in The Ghost of Tom Joad. It isn’t. The man in “Born in the U.S.A” is more than just a cool rocking daddy. He’s a disaffected Vietnam Veteran. There’s no jingoism in this song, though those who know only the chorus might think otherwise. It is true that the border songs on The Ghost of Tom Joad reveal Springsteen’s social conscience, but they aren’t his first songs addressing the hardships of others, and they aren’t his first or only songs that acknowledge or include Hispanic characters.

“Mary Queen of Arkansas,” a song on his first album, Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ, ends with an idea that Springsteen explores in many songs on various albums: the notion of starting over and the dream of a new place. There’s also the intriguing reference to “contacts deep in Mexico,” which returns with more complexity or at least more nuance on The Ghost of Tom Joad in “Sinaloa Cowboys” (when Miguel and Louis hear about the men in Sinaloa looking for some hands), and in “Balboa Park” (when we learn Spider grew up near the Zona Norte with hustlers and smugglers). Here’s the end of “Mary Queen of Arkansas”:

Mary queen of Arkansas, your white skin is deceivin’
You wake and wait, ooh, to lie in bait and you almost got me believin’
But on your bed, Mary, I can see the shadow of a noose
Whoa, I don’t understand how you can hold me so tight and love me so damn loose

But I know a place where we can go, Mary
Where I can get a good job and start out all over again clean
Oh, I got contacts deep in Mexico where the servants have been seen

Springsteen’s second album, The Wild, The Innocent, The E Street Shuffle, features a character named ‘Spanish Johnny’ in “Incident on 57th Street.” Here’s a relevant passage from that song:

“Hey, Spanish Johnny, you want to make a little easy money tonight?”
And Johnny whispered, “Goodnight, it’s all tight, Jane
I’ll meet you tomorrow night on Lover’s Lane
We may find it out on the street tonight, baby
Or we may walk until the daylight, maybe”
Oh, goodnight, it’s all right, Jane
I’m gonna meet you tomorrow night on Lover’s Lane

In this song, as in others, we find the temptation of easy money (as we see later in “Sinaloa Cowboys” and “Balboa Park”) and the optimism associated with future plans – that promise to “meet tomorrow night on Lover’s Lane.” The promise of a better tomorrow appears and reappears in Springsteen’s music. We hear it in “Born to Run” in the same-titled album (“Someday girl I don’t know when / We’re gonna get to that place / Where we really wanna go / And we’ll walk in the sun”), in “The Promised Land” on his fourth album (in which he also moves into a different landscape – the Utah desert), and in “Across the Border,” in which the dream of a better future is central to the song.

Seven years before The Ghost of Tom Joad was released, Springsteen covered two of Woody Guthrie’s songs on Folkways: A Vision Shared, A Tribute to Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly. Guthrie, of course, sang about Tom Joad in his Dust Bowl Ballads. That Springsteen was part of the tribute album underscores his commitment to the folk tradition of giving a voice to the oppressed. The Folkways album is a cohesive musical recognition of hardship and inequality. These are songs of empathy and defiance. Springsteen’s contributions to the album – covers of “I Ain’t Got No Home” and “Vigilante Man” – open a conversation he continues in his border songs on The Ghost of Tom Joad. Guthrie’s “Tom Joad,” inspired, of course, by Steinbeck, features a confrontation between a deputy sheriff, Preacher Casey, and Tom Joad. Preacher Casey gets clubbed, as does the deputy. The vigilante presence in that song is felt also in the violence of “Balboa Park.” It’s likely that vigilante tradition informs the stand-off between Carl and Bobby in “The Line,” though what happens between Carl and Bobby is more complicated. The us/them binary dissolves into something harder to parse.

Springsteen’s commitment to the disenfranchised didn’t begin with his border songs, nor did it end with them. Ten years after The Ghost of Tom Joad was released, Springsteen released his third acoustic album, Devils & Dust, the album that features “Matamoras Banks.” In his liner notes, Springsteen introduces that song with this explanation: “Each year many die crossing the deserts, mountains, and rivers of our southern border in search of a better life. Here I follow the journey backwards, from the body at the river bottom, to the man walking across the desert towards the banks of the Rio Grande.” A year after Devils & Dust, Springsteen released We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, which features many of the songs folk singer and social activist Pete Seeger helped to popularize.

What we hear in the border songs on The Ghost of Tom Joad has roots in the Mexican corrido tradition and in the work of Woody Guthrie and the American folk tradition. Consider this passage from Woody Guthrie’s “Tom Joad”:

Image courtesy of Julyan Davis (ballad series)

They stood on a mountain and they looked to the west,
And it looked like the promised land.
That bright green valley with a river running through,
There was work for every single hand, they thought,
There was work for every single hand.

That river, in some ways, is the same river we find in Springsteen’s “The River,” and the same river we find later in Springsteen’s “Across the Border.” “For what are we / Without hope in our hearts,” Springsteen asks in the last border song on The Ghost of Tom Joad. As grim as these songs are, they bear hope. Hope is why Miguel and Louis came to California, and why Louisa wants to cross the border. Hope may seem to get downgraded to survival in many corridos, but that’s not quite accurate. At the core of survival is hope, which is, at some point, irreducible. I felt it when I listened to The Ghost of Tom Joad after my grandma died. It’s in the art that comes after and out of trauma, and it’s a part of every murder ballad. It’s somewhere in “Balboa Park,” dark as that song is, and it’s in the raw, strange voices of corridistas on both sides of the river.