For our readers in the path of Hurricane Sandy, we wish you safety through the storm. Here in New York, they are shutting down the subways and making other preparations. Meanwhile, the residents have been out stocking up to prepare for the worst. It’s interesting to see the choices folks are making at the grocery stores in the face of possibly being holed up without power and refrigeration for some time. It seems the pessimists are grabbing up the water jugs, while the optimists are buying ice cream.
As a Bruce Springsteen fan, I cannot think of the name “Sandy” without thinking of “Fourth of July (Sandy),” one of the great early E Street Band songs.
Almost every line in the song is an arresting image in itself, whether the singer is telling us about the “tilt-a-whirl down on the south beach drag” or that “the cops finally busted Madame Marie for tellin’ fortunes better than they do.” Here and in the original, Springsteen sings to Sandy, “Love me tonight, and I promise I’ll love you forever.” But I have heard him change the words in other versions to an even more honest line, “Love me tonight, and I promise . . . I promise there won’t be any promises.”
In Songs (1998), Springsteen explained that he wrote “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” in mid-1973 after moving in with a girlfriend in a garage apartment five minutes from Asbury Park in Bradley Beach, NJ. The 23-year-old wrote it as “a goodbye to my adopted hometown and the life I’d lived there before I recorded. Sandy was a composite of some of the girls I’d known along the Shore.” He later explained the themes he was trying to address, “I used the boardwalk and the closing down of the town as a metaphor for the end of a summer romance and the changes I was experiencing in my own life.”
When the band planned to record the song, Springsteen hired a church children’s choir to sing on the track. But the kids did not show up on the day of the recording, so Suki Lahav — the wife of Springsteen’s sound engineer — sang the backing track and they overdubbed her voice to make it sound like a choir. It’s her voice you hear on “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” on The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle (1973).
In the late 1980s, I took a road trip with a friend from Cleveland to New York, and along the way we stopped in Asbury Park. I was surprised to discover then that there actually was a fortune teller there named Madam Marie. She was closed that day, so I did not get my fortune told. But it made me realize how Springsteen was able to take things from real life and transform them into great poetry. Although Madam Marie is no longer in Asbury Park because she passed away in 2008, here is hoping that Asbury Park and other areas along the shore survive Hurricane Sandy.
What is your favorite version of “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)”? Leave your two cents in the comments.
Last night in Gothenburg, Sweden, E Street Band history was made as Bruce Springsteen performed “Jungleland” for the first time on the new tour without the late Clarence Clemons. But the family name lives on as Clemons’s nephew — and new band member — Jake Clemons carried on the family tradition of evoking the pain and joy of the song. Below is his solo in “Jungleland,” which was the next-to-last song of the night (you may watch the entire song from a much further distance here):
“Jungleland will forever be associated with the Big Man Clarence Clemons, but it would have been a disservice to him to abandon the great song after his passing. Although we already had seen Jake play the song with another band in another setting, Springsteen did the right thing by waiting a short time and then bringing the song back with Jake as an unexpected surprise. As you can see in the video, at the end of the big solo, the crowd shows its appreciation. It was a bittersweet moment, as everyone was happy for Jake but also sad to be reminded of Clarence’s absence.
There is only one thing to do in the face of such sadness in life. Pause for a moment, and then get up to dance to the show closer “Twist and Shout.”
What do you think of the new “Jungleland”? Leave your two cents in the comments.
Nils Lofgren added some lyrics to help Danny Whitten finish what became a classic love song, “I Don’t Want to Talk About It.”
Nils Lofgren is a great talent who has had a spectacular career, often as a band member in the shadows of other stars like Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen. One piece of information I recently discovered is that he contributed to the classic ballad “I Don’t Want to Talk About It,” even though he is not in the song’s credits.
The song is by Danny Whitten and was originally recorded by Crazy Horse. Whitten struggled with finishing the song and Lofgren liked the song and encouraged him to finish it. Eventually Lofgren took the initiative to write a few more lines to finish the song. Crazy Horse released the song in 1971, and then in 1975 Rod Stewart had a hit in both the U.S. and the U.K. with the song, which appeared on his album Atlantic Crossing.
The song has a typical broken-heart theme, with the singer lamenting lost love. But “I Don’t Want to Talk About It” is one of the great heartbreak ballads of the twentieth century. The melody and the contradictions of the lyrics raise the song to another level, with the singer asking a lover to listen while at the same time saying he does not want to talk about it.
I don’t want to talk about it, how you broke my heart. If I stay here just a little bit longer, If I stay here, won’t you listen to my heart, whoa, heart? I don’t want to talk about it, how you broke this old heart.
Stewart rerecorded the song in 1989, and later he performed the song with Amy Belle. Other artists have covered the song too. The Indigo Girls did a nice cover for the soundtrack to the film Philadelphia (1993), and Everything But the Girl had a hit with the song in 1985 when they released it as a single in the UK.
YouTube used to have a video of Lofgren talking about the song, but it has disappeared. But here is the audio of a live version of Lofgren playing the song with a short introduction.
What do you think of “I Don’t Want to Talk About It”? Ballad classic? Leave your two cents in the comments.
This week, CNN premiered a short digital film of Bruce Springsteen discussing his life and his music, Wrecking Ball: A Conversation with Bruce Springsteen. He discusses how his upbringing affects his music and explains that his work has been about judging the distance between “American reality” and the “American dream.” He refers to current events like the recession and Occupy Wall Street, and he explains the critical and “often angry” patriotism that resides in his songs. He also revleals why he had to include the spiritual element of “Land of Hope and Dreams” on his latest album, Wrecking Ball, and he talks about his “elemental” relationship with the late Clarence Clemons (at around the 16:00 mark). Check out the film below:
“You have to be constantly listening and interested in listening to what’s going on every day,” Springsteen explains near the end. “You have to remain interested in life.” I am glad that the man has kept up his interest for so long.
What do you think of the new film? Leave your two cents in the comments.
On October 6, 2008 at Eastern Michigan University, as the U.S. faced a deep financial crisis, one of the country’s biggest living rock stars took the stage to sing on behalf of a United States presidential candidate. As Bruce Springsteen began strumming his guitar, the candidate stood in a tent behind the scenes with his family. The candidate, who would be elected the country’s first African-American president a month later, sang to his children and danced to the chorus of “This Land Is Your Land.”
“This Land Is Your Land,” along with “America the Beautiful,” is an unofficial national anthem. But this song that presidents sing — and that sometimes is sung in response to presidents’ actions — began as something different. It was written by a non-conforming down-and-out American troubadour more than seventy-five years earlier.
The Origins of “This Land Is Your Land”
Before “This Land Is Your Land” became a beloved American standard, it was a protest song. According to Joe Klein’s book Woody Guthrie: A Life, the 27-year-old Woody Guthrie began writing the song in 1940 out of anger and frustration.
At the time, Guthrie was living alone in a run-down hotel called Hanover House near Times Square in New York. He had moved there after wearing out his welcome as a house guest with singer-actor Will Geer and his wife Herta.
Having seen the struggles of common people across America, Guthrie turned his frustration on Irving Berlin’s portrayal of a perfect America in “God Bless America.” Radio disc jockeys repeatedly played Berlin’s song on the radio in the 1930s. In response, Guthrie began writing a song with the sarcastic title “God Blessed America”:
This land is your land, this land is my land, From California to Staten Island, From the Redwood Forest, to the Gulf Stream waters, God Blessed America for Me.
Guthrie wrote five more verses ending with the refrain “God Blessed America for me.” And one verse reported on the men and women standing in lines for food.
One bright sunny morning in the shadow of the steeple, By the relief office I saw my people — As they stood there hungry, I stood there wondering if God blessed America for me.
Guthrie continued to work on the song. He soon changed “Staten Island” in the refrain to “New York Island.” And he put the lyrics to the tune of the Carter Family’s “Little Darlin’, Pal of Mine.”
The Carter Family, though, did not originally write the music. They took the tune of “Little Darlin’, Pal of Mine” from the Baptist hymn, “Oh My Lovin’ Brother.”
After Guthrie finished “God Blessed America for Me” on February 23, 1940, he put the song away. The song then sat untouched for several years.
Then, in April 1944, Guthrie began recording a large number of songs for record executive Moe Asch. During the last recording session that month, Guthrie pulled out the old protest song. By now, it had a new tag line and a new title, “This Land Is Your Land.”
The recorded version of “This Land Is Your Land” did not include the verse about the relief office. One may speculate about the reasons, but Guthrie may have made the changes for a nation at war. Or perhaps he no longer saw a need to respond to “God Bless America.”
The artist and the producers did not treat “This Land Is Your Land” any differently than the other songs recorded at the sessions. Asch did not have the money to release any of the songs. So, once again the song sat in limbo. Asch, however, later claimed he recognized something important in the song. (p. 285.)
By December of that year, Guthrie had started using “This Land” as the theme song for his weekly radio show on WNEW. And the Weavers recorded the song too.
Most early recordings by Guthrie and other artists omitted one of the more controversial verses. The verse criticized capitalism and private property. It evoked a time when Guthrie and other Okies were turned away at the California border:
There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me; Sign was painted, it said private property; But on the back side it didn’t say nothing; This land was made for you and me.
I like the way this version starts with Woody, and then it transitions into his son Arlo Guthrie and other singers. The song stays understated before becoming a joyous hoedown with John Mellencamp.
Bruce Springsteen has performed “This Land Is Your Land” for decades. He included it on his Live 1975-1985 box set. And he also performed it with Guthrie’s friend Pete Seeger at a special concert in Washington to celebrate Pres. Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009.
More recently, on February 5, 2017, Lada Gaga included “This Land Is Your Land” in her Super Bowl halftime performance. As the country seemed divided in recent weeks following the inauguration of Donald Trump as president, Lady Gaga began with “God Bless America” and then went into “This Land Is Your Land.” Knowing that Guthrie wrote his song in response to “God Bless America” gives one a deeper understanding of Lady Gaga’s message that this land is for you and me.
Yet, I suspect many people who came of age around the 1960s first heard “This Land Is Your Land” sung by Peter, Paul & Mary. The trio, like many other artists, recognized that the song works best when everyone sings along.
The Legacy of “This Land Is Your Land”
“This Land is Your Land” took on a life of its own. And it no longer belongs to one person. For example, it can be used for discussion and criticized for its failure to connect the land to the Native Americans (although other artists have altered the song to do so). As noted in previous posts on Woody Guthrie, his work and his songs remain relevant today. Like Guthrie’s other songs, his most famous and timeless song, “This Land Is Your Land,” remains relevant too.
If Woody Guthrie had done nothing else besides write “This Land Is Your Land,” we would still honor him. “This Land Is Your Land” is the first song you think of when you think of the singer-songwriter. It is the song that ends every Guthrie tribute show. “This Land Is Your Land” is the song that David Carradine sings on top of a box car in the final scene of the Guthrie bio-pic Bound for Glory (1976). Also, it is the first song listed in Guthrie’s Wikipedia entry.
Additionally, “This Land Is Your Land” is the first Guthrie song you learned in school. And it is the song that Presidents dance to.
It all started with a relatively unknown drifter in the 1940s venting his anger and frustration in his lonely fleabag room. In that room, thinking about what he had seen traveling from California to the New York Island, Woody Guthrie wrote one of the country’s most beautiful songs.
{Woody at 100 is our continuing series celebrating the 100th Anniversary of the birth of American singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie on July 14, 1912. Check out our other posts on Guthrie and the Woody Guthrie Centennial too. }
What is your favorite version of “This Land is Your Land”? Leave your two cents in the comments. Photo via public domain.
For our readers in the path of Hurricane Sandy, we wish you safety through the storm. Here in New York, they are shutting down the subways and making other preparations. Meanwhile, the residents have been out stocking up to prepare for the worst. It’s interesting to see the choices folks are making at the grocery stores in the face of possibly being holed up without power and refrigeration for some time. It seems the pessimists are grabbing up the water jugs, while the optimists are buying ice cream.
When the band planned to record the song, Springsteen hired a church children’s choir to sing on the track. But the kids did not show up on the day of the recording, so Suki Lahav — the wife of Springsteen’s sound engineer — sang the backing track and they overdubbed her voice to make it sound like a choir. It’s her voice you hear on “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” on The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle (1973).
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