Speed of Life

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.

Memory Train: Springsteen's Land of Hope and Dreams

by Gregg Chadwick

Land of Hope and Dreams

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

People get ready, there's a train a-comin'
You don't need no baggage, you just get on board
All you need is faith to hear the diesels hummin'
Don't need no ticket, you just thank the Lord

-Curtis Mayfield, People Get Ready

Central Railroad of New Jersey Steam 4-6-2, Jersey City, New Jersey, February 06, 1954

My grandfather on my mother's side spent his working life as a train engineer on the Jersey Central Line. That itself sounds like a Springsteen lyric and explains part of my great love for Land of Hope and Dreams. (Listen Here) Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band first performed the song during the reunion tour in 1999, a live version was released on Live in New York City in 2001 and also on The Essential Bruce Springsteen in 2003.

The version of Land of Hope and Dreams featured on Wrecking Ball is the first studio recording of the song and poignantly includes one of the last recorded performances by E Street Band saxophonist Clarence Clemons, who died in June 2011.

The inclusion of this song at this point in this album is cathartic. Up to now, hope has been yearned for in Wrecking Ball but fear and doubt have threatened to overwhelm the lives of those living in the songs.

The album version of the song begins with a soloist from The Victorious Gospel Choir spiritualizing an echo of Curtis Mayfield's People Get Ready:

Oh, Oh, Oh, This Train

The full choir joins in with banjo and organ accompaniment:

Don't you want to ride?

This train, this train, this train,

Get onboard, Get onboard, Get onboard

Gregg Chadwick
An August Dream
20"x36" oil on linen 2011

Curtis Mayfield's People Get Ready was directly inspired by the Civil Rights March on Washington in August 1963 and Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have A Dream speech which was given from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at the event.

By using the metaphor of the train of salvation, Mayfield's inspiring song continues a tradition of American folk music that began with African American Spirituals referencing the Gospel Train and the Underground Railroad that was then continued by Woody Guthrie and Johnny Cash. As Juan Williams writes for NPR:

"The train that is coming in the song speaks to a chance for redemption -- the long-sought chance to rise above racism, to stand apart from despair and any desire for retaliation -- an end to the cycle of pain."

The amazing thing that speaks to the depth of Springsteen's inspiration is that we are only 30 seconds into the studio version of Land of Hope and Dreams and this much history has been evoked.

I suggest that you put on a pair of headphones and listen to the song with the music up loud because at this point the musical train thunders in with rumbling guitar, drums, mandolin and swirling keyboards. Every time I listen to this moment in Land of Hope and Dreams, I remember a photo of me as a little kid standing next to my grandpa Desch as he guides a Jersey Central steam engine down the tracks. It was in the 1960's, but the photo is in black and white tones that give the image a timeless quality that hovers somewhere between memory and dream.

Springsteen urges us onboard:

Grab your ticket and your suitcase

Thunder's rolling down this track

You don't know where you're goin' now

But you know you won't be back

Darlin' if you're weary

Lay your head upon my chest

We'll take what we can carry

And we'll leave the rest

Well, Big Wheels roll through fields

Where sunlight streams

Meet me in a land of hope and dreams

JMW Turner
Rain, Steam, and Speed - The Great Western Railway
36"x48" oil on canvas 1844
National Gallery, London

I will provide for you

And I'll stand by your side

I also think of my Dad's parents and the time we took a road trip deep into the South during the Civil Rights era. At a road stop somewhere along I95, in Georgia I think, my Grandma Chadwick saw me staring at a crude racist, epithet scrawled on a sign. She put her arm around me and said to me "Don't mind about those words. Those words aren't true. God loves everyone one of us - equally."

It was one of the first, and one of the best lessons about civil rights and equality that I have ever learned.

As Springsteen sings:

You'll need a good companion now for

This part of the ride

Leave behind your sorrows

Let this day be the last

Well, Tomorrow there'll be sunshine

And all this darkness past

I think of the more recent past and how much I needed to hear this song when I saw Springsteen and The E Street Band on the Reunion Tour in 1999. I took BART in from San Francisco to Oakland with a copy under my arm of Eric Alterman's recently published, It Ain't No Sin to be Glad You're Alive: The Promise of Bruce Springsteen. On the train over, I read the epilogue about a new song that Springsteen had written which was the initial live version of Land of Hope and Dreams. A relationship that I had thought was real was ending and I found myself in a place similar to the despair found in Michelle Moore's rap in Springsteen's Rocky Ground. I needed to get on board. That night in Oakland, my faith was rewarded in Land of Hope and Dreams. I was one with the crowd and the band carried us along.

Clarence Clemons and Bruce Springsteen
from the Born to Run cover shoot
June 1975
photo by Eric Meola

The next time I heard the E Street Band play Land of Hope and Dreams, the whole country needed the spirit that Springsteen's music at its best can provide. The Rising, with its call to national unity after the horrors of the September 11 attacks had been released in July 2002 and a month later I stood close to the stage by Clarence Clemons throughout the entire concert in San Jose. I had met Clarence at a private dot com gig in San Francisco a few years before and warmly remembered the giant hug he had given me after the event. In San Jose, during the bands homage to Amadou Diallo - "American Skin", Clarence Clemons' face was streaked with tears as he intoned the refrain "41 shots". The music roared that night. The crowd around knew the words to every song and sang them as if their lives depended on it. And maybe they did?

That August night in San Jose, the concert ended with a gospel fueled, steel engined, crowd propelling version of Land of Hope and Dreams. Now as I listen to the recorded version, with my headphones on and the music up loud, I can still see Clarence but the tears are mine as I listen to his last sax solo.

This Train

Dreams will not be thwarted

This Train

Faith will be rewarded

This Train

Hear the steel wheels singin'

This Train

Bells of freedom ringin'

As Clarence Clemon's last recorded solo fades, Springsteen slides into Curtis Mayfield's People Get Ready. As the train pulls into the final station, The Victorious Gospel Choir joins in with a musical epitaph for the Big Man.