The singer Bruce Springsteen called the grandfather of American music
Every single song Bruce Springsteen ever wrote had the roots of American music baked in there somewhere.
Those stories could have easily been about anybody when he first laid them down, but when listening to any track off of Born to Run or Darkness on the Edge of Town, he was telling the kind of stories for those who would never have the platform to do so for themselves. He was giving a voice to that side of America, but ‘The Boss’ was only going off the rich tradition of legends that had been reported in their music for generations.
If you look under the hood of a lot of Springsteen’s greatest songs, a lot of them are following that same tradition of storytelling that all great rock and rollers started out with. There may have been a few songs in his record collection that were absolute nonsense, but if we trace it back all the way to Chuck Berry, even he was telling these slice-of-life stories about teenage angst, whether it was the days of going to school or a kid who loved to play the guitar all night and day.
Berry liked to paint the listener a picture, but Springsteen’s greatest musical loves had to have some meaning behind those songs. Van Morrison made the listener feel every single note that he sang on a record like Astral Weeks, and if you’re talking about Springsteen’s first handful of records, it’s hard to get away from the looming shadow of Bob Dylan that towers over every single track.
Before Born to Run lit the world on fire, Springsteen seemed like the second iteration of Dylan in many respects. He, too, had long extended verses every single time he sang, and while he wasn’t looking to lecture in the same way that Dylan was, hearing his songs go on forever with one verse after another felt a lot similar to what was happening on records like Blonde on Blonde a decade before.
But after a while, Springsteen was a lot more familiar with the kind of music that came before Dylan. Even the greatest songwriters in the world need records to fall back on, and Woody Guthrie was practically the blueprint for what Dylan was. Guthrie might not have been the one to go electric in the middle of the folk scene, but his habit of sticking up for the little guy on tunes like ‘This Land Is Your Land’ was everything that American music stood for in Springsteen’s mind.
And compared to Dylan’s influence, Springsteen had to admit that no one did more for the sound of blue-collar America than Guthrie did, saying, “I’ve always said that Bob Dylan was the father of my country, but [Woody Guthrie] was the grandfather of my country. [His] was the first music where I found a reflection of America that I believed to be true. Where I believed that the veils had been pulled off and what I was seeing was the real country that I live in and what was at stake for the people and citizenry who are my neighbors and friends.”
Springsteen would be the last person to say that he managed to equal what Guthrie did for his generation, but it’s easy to see him take those lessons he learned from Guthrie and apply them to his generation. No one really had any idea what could be done after 9/11, and yet when listening to ‘The Boss’ work his way through ‘The Rising’ and ‘My City of Ruins’, he was trying to bring people together in the same way Guthrie did back in the day.
So while Springsteen doesn’t have a sticker on his guitar saying that his instrument kills fascists, he doesn’t really need to. With every single strum that he makes on that guitar, he’s putting 1000% of his efforts into making sure that everyone has the right to freedom, even if it means standing up to those who think they’re bigger than you. And chances are, Guthrie would be proud to see that kind of spirit still going in 2026.
