Today I want to feature a really remarkable essay by our good friend Danny Alexander. Originally written for a Springsteen conference last fall, “Two Lovers: Bruce Springsteen Reckoning with the Voices of Black Women” explores the relationship between two of Danny’s great passions, the rock music of Bruce Springsteen specifically and the pop and soul music of black women generally. Danny begins with a quote from James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” and ends with the same Bessie Smith lyric that Baldwin himself once repsonded to [See Baldwin’s “Uses of the Blues” at The Reading List]. I’ve taken the liberty of sprinkling a few mp3’s throughout Danny’s essay, as well, so you can hear what he’s talking about.

Also, for Reckoning #2, Danny fleshes out some of the ideas here in what amounts to a companion essay. Check out “The Ultimate Reckoning,” about Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” at his blog Take ‘Em As They Come. Enjoy, and let him know what you think.

Two Lovers:  Bruce Springsteen Reckoning with the Voices of Black Women

By Danny Alexander

“All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it”—James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues”

“Somehow, in a barracks or a bedroom, those sweetly voiced lines must have helped a few million heads lay more comfortably upon their pillows.  And so there’s no mystery at all, really, except how so many people can stand right before our eyes and not be seen.  Or heard.”—Dave Marsh, writing about the historical “puzzle” of the #1 popularity of the Shirelles’ “Soldier Boy”

When I first heard Bruce Springsteen’s “Two Faces,” I thought of Mary Wells’ record, “Two Lovers,” instead of Lou Christie’s “Two Faces Have I.”  I’d like to think Christie’s record, released in April of 1963 no doubt mixed it up in a 13 year old Bruce Springsteen’s mind with the Mary Wells record released just 4 months before.  They were both Top 10 records feeding the dreams of a kid just learning to play guitar.  24 years later, after that kid had grown up and become an American music icon, he got married, and when he settled down to write about it, he found himself borrowing Christie’s title and phrasing for a song that dealt with the same themes as that Smokey Robinson song sung by Mary Wells, a song about a lover with a split personality—one that “does things I don’t understand/Makes me feel like half a man.”

Not to deny that there are countless other influences on the mysterious synthesis that creates any song, but those Wells and Christie singles come from a particularly important season in Bruce Springsteen’s growth.  This is the year before the Beatles and the moment Bruce picked up the guitar he’d grown frustrated with years before.  From this same season, Roy Orbison’s “Leah” would be nicked for a title for Devils & Dust, The Crystals’ “He’s Sure the Boy I Love” surely seeded “Candy’s Room,” and two weeks after “Two Faces Have I,” The Crystals’ “Da Doo Ron Ron” would lay the foundation for “Born to Run” (and maybe a song like “All the Way Home”) while the themes would be set by Martha and the Vandella’s “Nowhere to Run” and the Animals’ “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” a couple of years later.

What I hear most strongly coming out of the voices of the girl groups is the politics of the bedroom, or in Springsteen terms–“from your front porch to my front seat,” as crucial to understanding the world that surrounds us.  That’s a connection Bruce Springsteen never forgets, perhaps never making it more explicit than in his cover of Jimmy Cliff’s “Trapped,” where the one who holds the key may be a lover or the whole damn “Jackson Cage.”  When Springsteen sang “Cover Me” live, a song he’d originally written for Donna Summer, he underscored the connection.  As that song struggled to begin each night, he’d utter that cry, “the whole world is out there,” against Patti Scialfa’s insistent “Nowhere to Run to baby, Nowhere to hide,” and it was plain that he was talking about not just two lovers taking refuge in each others’ arms, but he and the audience holding onto the moment before venturing back out into “the wild wind blowing” where everyone’s just waiting, “trying to score.”

It’s a tricky thing to talk about, the relationship between an individual white male artist and the black female vocalists who influence him because it’s a patronizing dynamic.  Unfortunately, it’s all but unavoidable when a term like “rock and roll,” or, especially, “rock” has been lifted from the black vernacular and recast as white and, most often, male.

*****

When I was three years into my first marriage, 7 years into that relationship, Tunnel of Love was released, and I found it spoke to the messy working realities of what was then a pretty good relationship in my own life.  I knew the “dirty little war” Springsteen sang about, and I also knew the triumph in Danny Federici’s organ at the end of “Two Faces,” a declaration of renewed commitment in the face of that most daunting adversary—the enemy that lives inside your own skin.

And I don’t think it’s any coincidence that, alongside Tunnel of Love, the music that spoke most clearly to me during this period was the music made by contemporary women vocalists.

Songs like Tina Turner’s “Better Be Good To Me,” Janet Jackson’s “What Have You Done for Me Lately,” Mikki Howard’s “Love Under New Management,” Karyn White’s “Superwoman,” and Michel ‘Le’s “No More Lies” forced me to reckon with the two faces that troubled my own marriage.  They were the breed of song I would grow to think of as the Sunday morning reckoning song, forcing me to look in the mirror and admit that as Springsteen sings in “One Step Up,” “somewhere along the line I slipped off track.”  They were the songs that kept me honest, and as En Vogue made plain in “Lies,” that honesty wasn’t just a personal issue but a matter of integrity that extended from the bedroom to the White House.

*****

“[Salt’N’Pepa’s “Shake Your Thang”] speaks to black women, calls for open, public displays of female expression, assumes a community-based support for their freedom, and focuses directly on the sexual desirability and beauty of black women’s bodies.” –Tricia Rose, Black Noise

“Heartbreaker, hip shaker, trouble maker/That’s the boy I’m waiting for” –The Crystals, “Heartbreaker”

“She says, baby if you wanna be wild, you’ve got a lot to learn” –Bruce Springsteen, “Candy’s Room”

The year after Tunnel of Love, Jody Watley’s “Don’t You Want Me,” Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam’s “Lost in Emotion,” Salt-N-Pepa’s “Push It,” and Pebbles’s “Mercedez Boy” (maybe even Natalie Cole’s cover of “Pink Cadillac”), by reveling in the act of celebrating one’s body and the things lovers can do together, spared this boy a few years of misery overcoming my shame-based WASP sexuality.  At the same time, these were songs where women took control of their sexual power.  While the Sunday morning reckoning song has its explicit assertion of justice in the face of a personal wrong, these songs of sexual liberation mean volumes in a society where black women had no rights to their own bodies for 400 years, and while black men were castrated and lynched and entire communities were burnt to the ground if a black man so much as looked at a white woman, white men had their way with black women as a matter of course.  And since white landowning males, that same self-congratulatory class that founded this country, were the perpetrators of such sexual violence, it should be more than a little obvious that the dominant class–which tends to be as despicably dishonest in these matters as it has been for those same four centuries—has a great deal to learn from the heirs to Memphis Minnie, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday, the women who pioneered the black, female voice on the radio while not just singing about turning tricks on the side to survive.

*****

“Until Motown, in Detroit, there were three big careers for a black girl . . . Babies, the factories or daywork.  Period.” –Mary Wells, from Gerri Hershey’s Nowhere to Run

From within and surrounding the increasingly outspoken politics of hip hop, many of the most politically outspoken and visionary voices on the radio were the voices of women, mostly black women.  Salt-N-Pepa’s “Let’s Talk About Sex” called for a frankness between genders and generations about sexual matters.  Janet Jackson declared a revolution of values in songs like “Rhythm Nation,” and 14-year-old Tracie Spencer covered John Lennon’s “Imagine” on her debut album and two years later had a hit with a song called “This House,” which showed she could imagine a world with no possessions.  Against an economic backdrop of escalating poverty and homelessness, its chorus stated, “This house is our house/Let’s give it to the people.” 

And I don’t think I would have heard these voices if it hadn’t been for Bruce Springsteen’s music.  The first time I remember being confronted with one of those Sunday morning reckoning songs was on a record Springsteen wrote for, ironically, a male R&B artist, Gary U.S. Bonds.  In his song, “On the Line,” Springsteen took that situation from “The River,” “Now I act like I don’t remember/And Mary acts like she don’t care,” and he placed it on the table for a couple to face head on.  The pain and fear in Bonds’ voice touched my own fears and left me hungry for more of that kind of honest reckoning, that need to see yourself through your lover’s eyes and deal with, not what you want to be there, but the truth.

And I suppose before that, the Pointer Sister’s #2 hit with his song “Fire” made me pay closer attention to the urgency in these Top 40 love songs generally ignored in the era of rock stations shouting “disco sucks” over the roar of their lily white formats (give or take the handful of Jimi Hendrix cuts they played).  And in songs like Donna Summers’ “She Works Hard for the Money,” I heard the working class call of Springsteen’s music, every bit as tough as most of what passed for rock.  And in Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car,” I heard “Born to Run,” “Thunder Road” and “The Promised Land” recast by a black woman’s voice with the sort of minimalist desperation of a “State Trooper” or an “Open All Night.”  When he and Little Steven worked together with a stunning array of hip hop and R&B talent on “Sun City,” it was only fitting that one of the moments that most jarred me was the great Darlene Love of the Blossoms, Bobbi Sox & the Blue Jeans (and off the record, the Crystals) dressing down the President of the United States with, “This quiet diplomacy is nothing but a joke!”

I heard these women who were Springsteen’s contemporaries in the 80s the same way he heard the girl groups of the 60s, and I do believe that’s a vital part of the legacy of that 13-year-old boy, evidence enough that he “learned more from a 3 minute record than [he] ever learned in school.”  Because of this influence, I hear the late 80s and early 90s as a golden age of black women’s voices changing the shape of the radio.  By 1994, half of the Top 20 singles on the radio were, for the first time in history, made by women artists.  The majority of those artists were black women, and a quarter of the Top 100 singles on the radio were made by black women.  These black women were the avant garde that led to both more women’s voices and more black voices on the radio over the entire decade to follow.  That’s a watershed moment in the history of rock and soul and rap that is part of a secret history of American music that can be traced back through Aretha Franklin to Clara Ward and Marion Williams and Mahalia Jackson, Laverne Baker and Ruth Brown (the R&B voice that built Atlantic Records), through Dinah Washington and Ethel Waters, to those women who were essential architects of what we call jazz and blues.

But this isn’t all just about Bruce Springsteen’s music as a gateway to neglected history; it’s also about the necessity of understanding the role of black women’s voices in Springsteen’s own canon.  To my ears, the instruction to “listen to your junk man” on “New York City Serenade” certainly points back to Patti LaBelle & the Bluebells’ “I Sold My Heart to the Junk Man,” just as “Bobby Jean” gives a nod to Darlene Love’s “Waiting ‘Til My Bobby Comes Home” along with her sometime group Bobbi Soxx and the Blue Jeans.  And then there’s the “Dancing in the Street” lyric laced through the refrain of “Racing in the Street.”  What does it mean that this song of reckoning with one’s choices that seem necessary to keep one’s soul alive touches back to the liberating vision of Martha and the Vandella’s hit, a song—ridiculous or not—associated with the race riots in the 60s that would, as Daniel Wolff describes in 4^th of July, Asbury Park, light up the sky of Springsteen’s adopted hometown, a town where the gap between the white and black working class was underscored as late as 1970 by burning crosses and the justified fears of Springsteen’s black female back-up singers as they journeyed out of their neighborhood to the Upstage to join his band.

Wolff’s book strongly suggests that Springsteen at least intuited how his band might help to break down such divisions playing with “blistering lead guitar like Ten Years After, plus the hokum and party atmosphere of the boardwalk” and “the feel of the soul music he and Van Zandt loved.”

And Springsteen’s music continues to be about listening across such boundaries.  In one of his most recent meditations on race, “American Skin [41 Shots],” a song about the murder of the African immigrant Amadou Diallo by New York City police, a song that today calls to mind a young Brazilian being shot 5 times in the head by London police and that also speaks to the way race highlights the gulf between classes in New Orleans, Springsteen adopts the voice of an African American mother named Lena giving her son life saving lessons that might keep him from being another Amadou Diallo.

She says “On these streets, Charles/You’ve got to understand the rules/If an officer stops you/Promise me you’ll always be polite, that you’ll never ever run away/Promise Mama you’ll keep your hands in sight.”

And on Devils & Dust, Springsteen gets at the very heart of the album with the song “Black Cowboys.”  On an album preoccupied with how fear sabotages love, he tells the tale of Lynette Williams, who tries to shield her son from the streets with books from the library, particularly his favorites about the black cowboys on the plains.  In the end, Lynette’s own fears blur her judgment and take her from her son, Rainey, but he carries the gift of her dreams with him as he heads out into the world on his own.  As with “Worlds Apart” and “American Skin,” “Black Cowboys” is a song that yearns to cross “a sea whose distance cannot be breached,” the distance between our dreams and our realities and even our own mortality, and the trickiest distance built into the heart of his aesthetic, the distance between a black woman living in poverty and a white male who’s living in luxury.

So in Devils & Dust’s “All I’m Thinking ‘Bout Is You,” when I hear Springsteen straining for a blues vocal with notes too high to hit in a voice just on the edge of a whisper, you might forgive me if I assume the girl with brown legs and brown eyes who haunts him stands in for those black women who first fueled his youthful imagination.  Consciously or unconsciously or, most likely, some shy mix of both, Bruce Springsteen has spent a career trying to repay that debt, and those who care about Springsteen’s legacy should not only not let this be forgotten but let this debt help us to dream our way across the many divisions that keep us apart.

Myself, I’ve spent a lot of time this past couple of weeks trying to reckon with the fact that the words Bessie Smith sang 78 years ago, still describe America today [from “Backwater Blues”, version 2; Bessie Smith’s “Backwater Blues,” version 1 is very similar]–

It thundered and it lightn’d and the winds began to blow
It thundered and it lightn’d and the winds began to blow
There was a thousand women, didn’t have no place to go . . . .

Backwater blues have caused me to pack up my things and go
Backwater blues have caused me to pack up my things and go
‘Cause my house fell down and I can’t live there no more . . . .

And there ain’t no place for a poor old girl to go

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