Bruce Springsteen often stresses his family’s Irish and Italian origins, and he has strong fan-bases in both countries.
His wife, Patti Scialfa, is proud of her similar heritage. The E Street Band’s list of surnames from Lofgren and Van Zandt to Weinberg and Federici perfectly illustrates the world diaspora that makes up the modern United States.
Is it any wonder then that Springsteen - more than any other major modern artist – is the champion of the refugee, the immigrant, the man and woman searching for a better life?
He lays it on the line in his 2007 album Magic. He may have shared a platform with Rev Jesse Jackson, and campaigned for John Kerry, but the political search for “something righteous” probably goes back to FDR, before the American flag, in Springsteen’s words, “flew so high/It drifted into the sky”; way back when the Stars and Stripes did mean certain things were set in stone, “Who we are, what we’ll do/And what we won’t”. (It is always an incarnation of Springsteen’s father who describes an ideal of America – from My Hometown to Long Walk Home.)
Springsteen’s most nakedly political record remains The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995). Here the characters occupy the new economic desperation underneath the first President Bush’s New World Order. These characters longed for FDR’s New Deal.
This was a complete album dedicated to the refugee and the disenfranchised American....
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