How Hank Williams inspired a classic Bruce Springsteen song
Especially in the earliest parts of his career, Bruce Springsteen was happy to wear his influences on his sleeve. The verbose writing style that he adopted on albums like Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. had their roots in Bob Dylan’s signature style, while his killer ‘Detroit Medley’ harkens directly back to his love of Mitch Ryder and other early rock-soul troubadours.
One of Springsteen’s more surprising musical loves belongs to country music. At the time Springsteen was coming up, country was beginning to solidify its love affair with pop music, but Springsteen wasn’t interested in the lighter stuff. His love extended to the roots of country music, and while writing the titular song to his 1980 album The River, Springsteen took inspiration from one of the most iconic figures in the history of the genre, Hank Williams.
“I love that old country music,” Springsteen told Dave Marsh in a 1981 interview for Musician magazine. “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.”
Specifically, Springsteen connected with Williams’ ‘Long Gone Lonesome Blues’. In it, Williams goes to drown his sorrows, and himself, in the nearest body of water. The only problem is that there’s no water. “I went down to the river to watch the fish swim by / But I got to the river so lonesome I wanted to die / And then I jumped in the river, but the doggone river was dry,” Williams sings.
“He goes down to the river to jump in and kill himself, and he can’t because it dried up,” Springsteen added in the interview. “That’s where I got the chorus.”
Despite the bleak inspiration, the other real-life inspiration behind ‘The River’ has a happier ending. Springsteen based most of the lyrics on his sister Virginia, who was married as a teenager and had a husband who had recently lost his job around the time Springsteen was composing the song. Springsteen would later reveal to audiences that Virginia and her husband had stayed married through the tumult, extending their marriage for decades.
