The singer Bruce Springsteen said transformed country music: “Top of his game”
Every single line Bruce Springsteen ever wrote always cared about the little guy in rock and roll music.
The entire rock community was built on people who were everyday workers trying to listen to something that excited them, and ‘The Boss’ never wanted to write songs that seemed out of the reach of his fans every time he played. That was part of what made heartland rock sound so perfect back in the day, but there was always a bit of overlap between what Springsteen was talking about and what he heard out of modern country music whenever he performed.
Then again, there’s no real reason why the two genres couldn’t co-exist. Rock and roll was a descendant of country music and the blues, and while Springsteen’s characters are talking about the world that exists on the other side of a turnpike, he’s got something in common with songs that Johnny Cash used to sing about the simpler side of life deep in the American South. But aside from those growing up in Georgia or Alabama, there was something else going on in the Midwest.
People like Bob Seger were already catching a much different feeling when he started making his tunes, but John ‘Cougar’ Mellencamp was detailing the kind of life no one else could have imagined. He did come from that same small town that he talked so much about, and while there wasn’t all that much to be interested in as far as hometown heroes were concerned, Mellencamp was going to do everything he could to make the same kind of rock and roll he heard in his record collection.
But somewhere along the way, he managed to cross over to what country music was doing. A lot of his best songs could have easily been played on an acoustic guitar and sounded great on their own, and when you look at the kind of country music that exists today, you can give Mellencamp either the credit or the blame for making every song sound like the simpler side of life.
That’s not even a bad thing, either. A lot of people related to those because they were about the people you heard every single day, and while ‘Hurts So Good’ wasn’t exactly teaching the most wholesome message of all time or anything, Mellencamp’s influence can be traced all the way from Garth Brooks making slice-of-life songs to even someone like Jake Owen sampling ‘Jack and Diane’ directly in one of his tunes.
And while country music can be a big turn-off for a lot of rock and roll fans, Springsteen felt that building up that reputation is something that Mellencamp should be proud of, saying, “He remains at the top of his game as both a songwriter and a performer. It’s a performance that rings with the echoes of Woody, Hank, Brando, and Bob. His mixture of country and roots instrumentation with the rock band is something that he invented that forms the bedrock of alternative country and country music today that he hasn’t gotten the credit for.”
Any other rock star of that calibre would have been doing pretty well for themselves, but the fact that Mellencamp was able to put his money where his mouth was says a lot. He never moved out of his home state and preferred to live a life in the Hollywood Hills, because even if he could live the life of a rich rockstar, his greatest strengths were always about looking at the kind of faces that he knew in the days before he was famous.
Those hallmarks of everyday life are something that Mellencamp never forgot about, and even though Springsteen has gone through many different phases of his life, he knew that Mellencamp could be used as a model for what all great rock and rollers were supposed to be. Anyone can manage to make the greatest music that they can, but being able to continue growing as a songwriter is what made his music endure for decades at a time.
