Speed of Life: 2009. wrecking ball

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Tuesday, March 06, 2012

The Gospel and Blues of Rocky Ground

by Gregg Chadwick

Rocky Ground

(Song by Song Review of Bruce Springsteen's New Album - Wrecking Ball)

''The verses are the blues, the chorus is the gospel."

- Bruce Springsteen in Conversation With Jon Pareles in The New York Times July 14, 2002

Gregg Chadwick
The Luminist
12"x12" oil on linen 2010

As if reaching out from the past into the present, Bruce Springsteen's song Rocky Ground (Listen Here) opens with a ghostly voice calling out the refrain "I'm a soldier."

This verbal fragment was culled from a historical performance of the Church of God in Christ Congregation's rendition of I'm A Soldier In The Army Of The Lord, recorded by musical historian Alan Lomax in Clarksdale, Mississippi in 1942*.

The song then shifts to the chorus, sung by the gospel singer Michelle Moore:

We've been traveling over rocky ground, rocky ground

Only after this spiritual initiation does Springsteen sing the first verse:

Rise up shepherd, rise up

Your flock has roamed far from the hills

The stars have faded, the sky is still

The angels are shouting "Glory Hallelujah"

Springsteen's voice is yearning, soulful, bluesy. The music behind the singer brings to mind Springsteen's mournful song Streets of Philadelphia. Understated piano, a looped, patterned drum rhythm and atmospheric guitar wash across Rocky Ground. Mournful horns set a Van Morrison vibe.

Jacob Lawrence's magnificent Migration Series comes to mind. These paintings documented the African American movement from the rural south to the urban north between the World Wars. From his small studio in Harlem, Jacob Lawrence let loose with a flurry of deeply resonant and poignant words and images that encapsulated the hopes, fears, and dreams of a community moving into the unknown; often bolstered only by faith. The promise of a new day was coming, but the road was hard.

Jacob Lawrence

The Migration Series, Panel no. 3:
From every southern town migrants left by the hundreds to travel north.
12"x18" tempera on gesso on composition board 1940-41
The Phillips Collection, Washington DC

As if to mark in music the history of this Great Migration, Springsteen's Rocky Ground moves from a folk recording from 1940's rural Mississippi, to Michelle Moore and the Victorious Gospel Choir to a more contemporary musical style: rap.

Jacob Lawrence
The Migration Series, Panel no. 58:
In the North the Negro had Better Educational Facilities
12"x18" tempera on gesso on composition board 1940-41
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Moore's rap flows smoothly into the structure of the song setting us up for a powerful dose of spoken word blues:

You use your muscle and your mind and you pray your best

That your best is good enough, the Lord will do the rest

You raise your children and you teach 'them to walk straight and sure

You pray that hard times, hard times, come no more

The lyrics turn from hope to fear and doubt:

You try to sleep, you toss and turn, the bottom's dropping out

Where you once had faith now there's only doubt

You pray for guidance, only silence now meets your prayers

The morning breaks, you awake but no one's there

The intoning voice from the 1940's attempts to give strength. The choir provides a chorus of resilience. Springsteen returns and sings, "There's a new day coming." But as this morning breaks we are alone in our struggles. This existential moment at the abyss is chilling. No one's there.

Gregg Chadwick
Under the Copper Sky
30"x22" monotype on paper 2011

In 2002 Springsteen explained to Jon Pareles in The New York Times that in his music he has to "come to grips with the real horrors that are out there. And that all people have is hope. That's what brings the next day and whatever that day may bring. "

Springsteen goes on to explain that "hope is grounded in the real world of living, friendship, work, family, Saturday night. And that's where it resides. That's where I always found faith and spirit. I found them down in those things, not some place intangible or some place abstract. And I've really tried to write about that basic idea my whole life.''

Unknown Fiddler from Southern US Field Trip, 1959
photo by Alan Lomax

In Rocky Ground Springsteen adopts the traditional sounds and imagery of gospel, but for Springsteen faith and spirit are not found in the realm of angels but instead in the doggedness of daily life. Rocky Ground poignantly reminds us that hope is found in the courage to live each day to its fullest, in the sacrifices that parents make so that their children perhaps will have a more fulfilling life, and in the loving community of friends and family that brings meaning to our shared existence.

*NOTE:

Alan Lomax was one of the great field collectors of folk music of the twentieth century, recording thousands of songs in the United States, Great Britain, Ireland, the Caribbean, Italy, and Spain. Lomax recorded in the plantations, levee camps, prisons and railroad yards where the men and women of the blues came from and the music was born.

More Song by Song Reviews of Wrecking Ball:

1. We Take Care of Our Own

2. Easy Money

3. Shackled and Drawn

4. Jack of All Trades

5. Death to My Hometown

6. This Depression

7. Wrecking Ball

8. You've Got It

9. Rocky Ground

10. Land of Hope and Dreams

11. We Are Alive

More at:

"Bruce Springsteen's widescreen vision of America on Wrecking Ball is filled with terror, tension, tenacity and above all else, triumph which may not replenish your bank account, but it will replenish your soul."

-Anthony Kuzminski, Bruce Springsteen - Wrecking Ball, antiMusic

"What was done to my country was un-American."

Shackled and Drawn

Jack of All Trades

Death to My Hometown

From Down Under: Sean Sennett Talks With Springsteen About Wrecking Ball

All Things Shining by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly

The Working Man's Voice - The Wall Street Journal

A More Chaste Review of You've Got It by Jonathan Lack

Parsing the Samples and Quotes on Wrecking Ball

Bruce Springsteen, Théatre Marigny press conference, Paris, February 2012

Don't Miss This Upcoming Event on NPR:

NPR Music will broadcast Bruce Springsteen's keynote speech from the SXSW Music Festival in Austin, Texas. The live webcast of that address will take place on NPR Music on March 15 at noon Central time.

We Are Alive

by Gregg Chadwick

We Are Alive

(Song by Song Review of Bruce Springsteen's New Album - Wrecking Ball)

"Also, those are voices from history and other sides of the grave. If you listen to the record, I use a lot of folk music. There’s some Civil War music. There’s gospel music. There are ’30s horns in “Jack of All Trades.” That’s the way I used the music — the idea was that the music was going to contextualize historically that this has happened before: it happened in the 1970s, it happened in the ’30s, it happened in the 1800s… it’s cyclical. Over, and over, and over, and over again. So I try to pick up some of the continuity and the historical resonance through the music."

-Bruce Springsteen, Théatre Marigny press conference, Paris, February 2012

Gregg Chadwick
Ciudad de la Memoria
38"x38" oil on linen 2005
Michael and Renee Hertzberg Collection, Beverly Hills

The final track on Wrecking Ball, We Are Alive (Listen Here), is a folk hymn that weaves together death, sacrifice, memory, and transcendence. The song opens with the sound of a record needle scratching across vinyl - a nostalgic warmth that conjures up the history of recorded music. The sounds of We Are Alive bring us from Edison's wax cylinders to vinyl LP's to digital tracks. The words of We Are Alive lead us through the history of the struggle for human rights in the United States. Like a folk spirit cut loose from Dicken's A Christmas Carol, the singer of We Are Alive touches down in three stages of our country's life: the historical past of the 19th century, the recent past of 1960's Civil Rights era, and the contemporary reality of new immigrants trying to reach this land of promise.

We Are Alive's melody channels the trumpet riff from Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire as we open cinematically upon a dark scene:

There's a cross up yonder up on Calvary Hill

There's a slip of blood on a silver knife

There's a graveyard kid down below

Where at night did come to life

And above the stars, they crackle in fire

A dead man's moon throws seven rings

Well, we put our ears to the cold grave stones

This is the song they'd sing

We are alive

And though our bodies lie alone here in the dark

Our spirits rise to carry the fire and light the spark

To stand shoulder to shoulder and heart to heart

Mitchell Friedman
The Path Between
monotype
43" x 31"
courtesy Mitchell Friedman*1

More than any other of Springsteen's songs, We Are Alive suggests a Southern Gothic world. The lyrics set us in a land neither living nor dead bringing to mind Edgar Allan Poe's haunting short story The Premature Burial. In Poe's story the main character is afflicted by a condition, catalepsy, in which he randomly falls into a death-like trance, and thus carries with him a continual fear of being buried alive.

Throughout the album Wrecking Ball, Springsteen tries to wake us from our national spiritual catalepsy. We, as a people, are asleep but not dead and need only to rise again to continue the struggles for labor rights, immigrant rights, and civil equality throughout our land.

Springsteen sings :

A voice cried out, I was killed in Maryland in 1877

When the railroad workers made their stand

Sixth Regiment Fighting its way through Baltimore

during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877

"Harper's Weekly, Journal of Civilization," Vol XXL, No. 1076,

Saturday, August 11, 1877

The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 referenced by Springsteen in the above lines was arguably the key moment in the birth of the modern labor movement in the United States. The blood of the men and women cut down on city streets and country lanes across America catalyzed labor strikes and actions that woke up a citizenry yearning for a better life and hope in a depressed economy ruled by corporate giants that had bought the presidency for Rutherford B. Hayes.

The actions of industrialists in this era and the corruption of Hayes and his cronies answer a deeply important political question. What happened to the Republican party of Abraham Lincoln? How did the GOP devolve into a party of privilege not progressiveness? The simple answer: the Republican party was bought off by Thomas Scott of the Pennsylvania Railroad and in a perverse election deal sold off Abraham Lincoln's legacy of equality for all Americans by ending Reconstruction in the former Confederate States:

"Many Americans in 1877 believed their new president had reached the White House through fraud. Certainly Rutherford B. Hayes, a Republican, was not the man for whom a majority of voters had cast their ballots the previous year. Democrat Samuel Tilden overcame the Ohio governor in the popular vote but 20 disputed electoral votes from Florida and other states threw the election into theHouse of Representatives.
Thomas Scott of the Pennsylvania Railroad reached a deal with Hayes: in exchange for a federal bailout of his troubled investment in the Texas and Pacific Railroad, the millionaire industrialist would deliver Congressional votes to Hayes. As a further inducement, the Republicans promised to end Reconstruction, a blatant betrayal of African Americans. Southern Congressmen deserted Tilden, handing the election to Hayes."*2

A bank panic on Sept. 18, 1873 disintegrated into a nationwide economic depression. "Weekly the layoffs, wage cuts, strikes, evictions, breadlines and hunger increased," wrote Richard Boyer and Herbert Morais in Labor’s Untold Story. As he promised to his financial and political supporters, President Hayes withdrew federal soldiers from the South and moved the forces to act as shock troops for the newly empowered corporate barons who were slashing wages across the board. Angry railroad workers took control of switches and blocked the movement of trains. As Harper’s Weekly reported the following month, "Governor Matthews evoked the aid of the national government. President Hayes responded promptly." Federal troops armed with Springfield rifles and Gatling guns arrived."

Even in the face of the overwhelming fire power arrayed against them, the railroad workers made their stand.

At this moment in We Are Alive, the folk spirit singer slides into the future and delivers us to the doorstep of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Its Sunday morning, September 15, 1963 and the Ku Klux Klan has just bombed the church killing four young African American girls.

Well, I was killed in 1963 one Sunday morning in Birmingham

"This murderous act shocked the nation and galvanized the civil rights movement. Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley were dressed in their "Youth Sunday" best, ready to lead the 11:00 adult service at the church, which since its construction in 1911 had served as the center of life for Birmingham's African American community. Only a few minutes before the explosion, they had been together in the basement women's room, excitedly talking about their first days at school. The bombing came without warning.

Following the tragic event, white strangers visited the grieving families to express their sorrow. At the funeral for three of the girls (one family preferred a separate, private funeral), Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke about life being "as hard as crucible steel." More than 8,000 mourners, including 800 clergymen of both races, attended the service. No city officials braved the crowds to attend."*3

Mourners follow the coffin of a young church bombing victim during a funeral in Birmingham, Ala. in September 1963 The victim was one of four young girls killed in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church several days earlier.
Associated Press file photo

Now, Springsteen's folk spirit singer hovers in the current American Southwest at the unmarked grave of a group of immigrants who perished attempting to cross the border to provide better lives for themselves and their families while giving to our country the fruits of their labor.

Well, I died last year crossing the southern desert

My children left behind in San Pablo

Well they left our bodies here to rot

Oh please let them know

We are alive

Oh, and though we lie alone here in the dark

Our souls will rise to carry the fire and light the spark

To fight shoulder to shoulder and heart to heart

Let your mind rest easy, sleep well my friend

It's only our bodies that betray us in the end

I awoke last night in a dark and dreamy deep

From my head to my feet, my body had gone stone cold

There were worms crawling all around me

Fingers scratching at an earth black and six foot low

And alone in the blackness of my grave

Alone I'd been left to die

Then I heard voices calling all around me

The earth rose above me, my eyes filled with sky

We are alive

And though our bodies lie alone here in the dark

Our souls and spirits rise

To carry the fire and light the spark

To fight shoulder to shoulder and heart to heart

To stand shoulder to shoulder and heart to heart

We are alive

We Are Alive introduces us to past victims in the continual struggle for justice, civil rights and a fair and equitable path to a better life. Springsteen illustrates that a shared history of sacrifice connects us, that we have been here before — countless graves hold the bodies from those who perished in 1877, in 1963, and now. Countless Americans have been gunned down or held back in chains in their pursuit of the elusive American Dream.

The ghosts in “We Are Alive” sing to us that there is hope to be found in the sacrifices of the past and the promise of the future. Though many perish, the Dream lives on. The song isn't a closing but instead a beginning…

Notes:

1. Mitchell Friedman's artwork is deeply moving. His website Mitchell Friedman Art is a treasure trove of passion, mystery and beauty. William Zimmer in The New York Times writes of his work: “Mr. Friedman’s artwork is also spiritual. A sense of epiphany, of an awesome realization of the glories of nature, permeates his art.”

2. The UE (United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America) site provides invaluable information on the history and struggles of labor in the United States and I highly recommend spending time on their website to gather a clear history of the movement.

3. The website, We Shall Overcome, Historic Places of the Civil Rights Movement, is a deeply moving and important history of the struggle for justice and equality in the United States.