The forgotten folk song at the heart of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Highway Patrolman’
In the winter of 1982, Bruce Springsteen sat in a darkened room with a four-track tape deck, recording a series of demos intended for the E Street Band to work with.
The recordings were meant to be a rough sketch, but their raw, spectral quality led Springsteen to decide they sounded best as they were, giving birth to his solo album Nebraska, which remains the high-water mark for American gothic songwriting.
Among these haunting tracks was ‘Highway Patrolman,’ a stark, devastating portrait of a lawman caught between his badge and his blood (AKA, his good for nothing brother): “My name is Joe Roberts, I work for the state / I’m a sergeant out of Perrineville barracks number 8 / I always done an honest job, as honest as I could / I got a brother named Franky, and Franky ain’t no good,” he sings.
It is a tale as old as time: we need look no further than Noel Gallagher or Ray Davies to know that sometimes, a sibling can be the heaviest (or certainly the most annoying) cross you have to carry. Yet, Springsteen gives the trope a noirish weigh in his lyricism: “I get a call over the radio, Franky’s in trouble downtown / Well, if it was any other man, I’d put him straight away / But when it’s your brother, sometimes you look the other way”.
The track’s narrative power was so immense that it sparked an entire creative ecosystem, acting as the basis for Sean Penn’s 1991 directorial debut, The Indian Runner, while also famously providing the opening salvo for Johnny Cash’s 1983 covers album, Johnny 99. Phoebe Bridgers, another songwriter drawn to Nebraska’s stark storytelling, once singled out ‘Highway Patrolman’ as a particular favourite, recalling: “It was the first Bruce Springsteen song that I personally discovered, and I fell in love with it. It’s obviously fictitious, but he had such an interesting angle. It’s casually sad, which is my favourite kind of sad and with ‘Highway Patrolman’, he doesn’t even have to say why it’s sad.”
But while the story of Sergeant Joe Roberts feels like a Fargo-esque crime thriller, its roots are tangled in much older, darker American folklore, with one of the song’s most evocative lines serves as a chilling historical anchor: “Me and Franky laughin’ and drinkin’, nothin’ feels better than blood on blood / Takin’ turns dancin’ with Maria as the band played ‘Night of the Johnstown Flood’”. While the folk song provided Joe, Franky and Maria with a merry lilt to dance to in the song, the real Johnstown Flood of 1889 was a true American apocalypse. Following the catastrophic failure of the South Fork Dam, 14.55million cubic meters of water engulfed the Pennsylvania town, killing 2,208 people and creating the modern-day equivalent of $500million dollars in damage.
While the tragedy has inspired various musical laments over the years, Springsteen was most likely nodding to the traditional folk song ‘The Johnstown Flood’. It was forever immortalised in a recording of folk singer Mack Moody, a Vermont farm labourer who lived in a one-room cabin without electricity. Moody sat in folklorist Sandy Paton’s kitchen in 1963 and sang 47 songs from memory, ‘The Johnstown Flood’ included, which was one of his favourites. Paton’s recording eventually found its way onto the 1977 compilation Brave Boys: New England Traditions In Folk Music, though it is now an album so obscure this writer could only track it down via a £0.99 digital purchase on Amazon Music.
The lyrics Moody sings paint a harrowing picture: “A cry of distress rose from east to the west… quickly, fly up to the hills!”, and by weaving this old folk lament into the backdrop of a Michigan dance hall, Springsteen used the ghosts of the song to foreshadow the inevitable ruin of the Roberts brothers. Just as the “brave and bold” horse rider in ‘The Johnstown Flood’ tried to save the town before they were “hurled at once into a watery grave”, Joe Roberts tries (and ultimately probably fails) to save his brother from his own destructive nature. And, in letting his brother escape after injuring someone in a bar brawl (“Well, I chased him through them county roads/ ‘Til a sign said Canadian border five miles from here/I pulled over the side of the highway/ And watched his tail lights disappear”), he ruins his own reputation as an honest man of the law too.
What began as a lone Vermont labourer recording a disaster ballad in 1963 would find new life in Springsteen’s 1982 ‘Highway Patrolman’, before continuing onwards still to modern artists like Phoebe Bridgers, who continues to be inspired by Springsteen’s forlorn tales.
