How Hank Williams inspired a classic Bruce Springsteen song
Every element of Bruce Springsteen captures the beating heart of America. Although he might not have intended to be one of the biggest spokesmen for the US when cutting his teeth in New Jersey, his tales of lost souls scattered throughout the heartland resonated with everyone who has ever had their backs against the wall and looked for ways out of their nowhere towns. While most of that passion comes from Springsteen’s love of rock and roll, his moodier moments on ‘The River’ were indebted to the sounds of country music legend Hank Williams.
For any passive music fan, trying to find an overlap between Williams’ and Springsteen’s music tends to be like comparing apples with designer furniture. Although both of them may have represented a specific genre of music incredibly well for their time, they both seem to be from different sides of the tracks, with Williams singing about the troubles growing up in the American south long before rock and roll had become a major success.
Looking at his background, though, Williams was practically a rock star before the genre was invented. Having a long history with drugs and getting into all kinds of nefarious behaviour behind the scenes, Williams was known as a musical troubadour throughout his career, constantly pushing the envelope for what could be done with the medium.
Although Springsteen never claimed to be a heavy drinker throughout his career, he understood the depth Williams put into every one of his songs. Rather than look at the legend that many people have been told about the country legend, Springsteen related to the stories taking place in songs like ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart’, depicting the kind of doomed romances that everyone falls in and out of.
While doing press for The River, Springsteen would discuss Williams’s massive impact on his musical taste, saying, “There was a certain something in all that stuff that just seemed to fit in with things that I was thinking about, or worrying about. Especially the Hank Williams stuff. He always has all that conflict, he always has that real religious side, and the honky tonkin’, all that side”.
In Williams’ own ‘Long Gone Lonesome Blues’, he sings about a man who has lost the will to live and finds himself looking over a river about to jump in. Before letting the water take him, he discovers everything ran dry. While the song is meant to have a tongue-in-cheek bent, the protagonist still sees the tragedy in the situation, almost lamenting that he can’t even shuffle off this mortal coil correctly.
If Williams used the river to symbolise the end of the line, Springsteen uses it as a chance for salvation one last time. Throughout the song, Springsteen’s narrator has seen his future flash before his eyes, getting his girlfriend pregnant when still in his teens and having to go into a blue-collar job to support his new family.
Although he has to sacrifice his dreams to support his other half, they each take one night to jump into the river together one last time, as if to preserve some sense of childhood abandon that they had when things weren’t scarred with reality. While Williams may have been singing about an actual death in his song, ‘The River’ revolves around the death of innocence that too many people have to figure out the hard way.
