The Nebraska unicameral legislature in 2015 voted to abolish the death penalty, following a number of states that have come to realize that capital punishment is ineffective and a waste of resources. Although Governor Pete Ricketts vetoed the action, the legislature overrode his veto, making Nebraska the eighteenth state (in addition to the District of Columbia) that does not sentence human beings to death. According to a recent book on the history of the death penalty,
One of the great songs about the death penalty is Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska,” which Springsteen based on Terrence Malick’s movie Badlands. And that movie was loosely based on the real-life case involving Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate.
The song, in the voice of the condemned, offers no straightforward judgement on the death penalty. Springsteen would address the topic again years later in his song “Dead Man Walking.”
But by taking the voice of the condemned man in “Nebraska,” Springsteen challenges the listener to find some humanity in the narrator. By the time the singer/condemned tries to explain why he did the horrific things he did, all he can come up with is “I guess there is just a meanness in this world.” Taken on its face, one might find little sympathy for the killer. But the way Springsteen sings the words, you believe that the condemned is not a personification of evil. Instead, he comes across as someone unable to understand the world because he has been on the other end of that meanness his whole life too.
Thus, it is not surprising that in the real world, Bruce Springsteen is opposed to capital punishment. Below, following an introduction about how the album Nebraska focuses on the downtrodden, Springsteen performs the song “Nebraska” on a 12-string guitar with harmonica from a benefit show in Los Angeles in November 1990.
The real Starkweather grew up with a birth defect and a speech impediment, and he was a slow learner. Nebraska executed Charles Starkweather in the electric chair, just like in Springsteen’s song. Starkweather died on June 25, 1959 at the age of 20.
The young teenaged girl who went with him on the murder spree did not die in his lap. She was eventually paroled in 1976 and lives in Michigan, which is the first state in the United States to abolish capital punishment.
Check out our posts on other songs about capital punishment.
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(Some related Chimesfreedom posts.)
