Bruce Springsteen Goes Twang

The argument for Springsteen as a roots musician is not a difficult argument to make. The evidence is in the records.

Nebraska, released in 1982, is a solo acoustic album recorded directly to a four-track cassette machine. The songs are stark, the productions are minimal, and the subject matter — murder, poverty, the American interior — owes more to the country songwriting tradition than to arena rock. The record was recorded as a demo and released as a finished work because nothing that came out of the subsequent full-band sessions matched what the cassette captured.

That is the clearest single exhibit, but the thread runs much longer and wider than one record.

The folk and country roots

Springsteen's early influences were not primarily country artists, but the music he came to respect most as a writer was rooted in folk and country forms. The American song tradition — the pre-rock, pre-pop tradition of narrative folk music, storytelling song, and plain-spoken country — is the substrate beneath the E Street Band records, audible most clearly when the band is pulled away.

The 1993 MTV Unplugged recording shows this more plainly than the studio work. Stripped back, the rock architecture removed, the songs reveal their underlying structure. The chord movements and melodic shapes that drive The River, Atlantic City, and Racing in the Street are closer to traditional folk forms than to classic rock forms.

This is not an obscure or revisionist reading. Springsteen has discussed it directly in interviews. His engagement with Pete Seeger, which produced the We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions album in 2006, was not an anomaly. It was a public acknowledgment of a connection that had been structurally present for decades.

The tracks

The Goes Twang format at this site is a listening essay that describes a sequence of tracks connecting a mainstream artist to the acoustic, country, and traditional roots underneath their more familiar work.

For Springsteen, the sequence runs through several distinct clusters.

The Nebraska cluster: The album itself is the primary entry. The original four-track demos differ from the released versions in subtle but audible ways. Both are essential. The poverty and isolation of the subjects comes out of a country tradition of songs about people in extremity.

The folk and gospel cluster: Springsteen's engagement with American traditional music — folk, gospel, old-time — has been more sustained than his rock career would suggest. The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995) is an acoustic album in the tradition of Nebraska. We Shall Overcome (2006) is a full commitment to Seeger's folk legacy, played with a large ensemble that sounds like a barn dance crossed with a New Orleans second line.

The collaboration and cover cluster: Springsteen's covers of folk and country material illuminate his tastes more directly than the original recordings. His versions of traditional folk songs, his engagement with artists like Patti Smith and Pete Seeger on benefit recordings, and the informal performances that have circulated from acoustic tour dates all point toward the same underlying tradition.

The connection to country

The country connection is more complicated than the folk connection because country music, by the time Springsteen emerged as a performer, had become a more distinct commercial genre. The distance between the Nashville Sound of the 1960s and 1970s and Springsteen's Jersey Shore rock is real.

But the underlying country tradition — the Hank Williams tradition, the tradition that runs from Woody Guthrie through the early Sun Records artists and into the first wave of outlaw country — is a different thing from Nashville's commercial output. That tradition is about class, about place, about the experience of people without the resources to be celebrated. It is the tradition Springsteen was writing within long before he acknowledged it explicitly.

The Allman Brothers Band Goes Twang covers another side of this southern roots story. The Mixtapes index has the full Goes Twang series including Bob Dylan Goes Twang Part Two, The Band Goes Twang, and Willie Nelson Goes Twang.

The argument

The case for Springsteen as a roots musician is not that he is secretly a country artist. It is that the country and folk tradition is where the structural integrity of his best work comes from, and that the rock presentation is the vehicle rather than the origin.

Nebraska makes this case conclusively. So does The Ghost of Tom Joad. So does We Shall Overcome. The rock records make it less plainly but, listened to with this in mind, they make it too.

The twang is there. It always was.