In January, over the course of three days, Bruce Springsteen wrote, recorded and released the political protest song Streets of Minneapolis.
The song’s release was a matter of urgency and reflects Springsteen’s fury towards the Minneapolis immigration enforcement operation from the United States Department of Homeland Security with around 2,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers and agents.
Last month, Renée Good and Alex Pretti were killed by ICE in separate incidents. In his lyrics, Springsteen names them as a memorial tribute, “citizens [who] stood for justice”. He refers to ICE as “King Trump’s private army”.
Springsteen marches in the footsteps of protest songs from legendary artists such as Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan who raised their lyrical voices in a direct response against injustice.
The Dust Bowl migrants
On January 30 Tom Morello, the guitarist with social activist rock band Rage Against the Machine, held a benefit concert to support the families of the Minneapolis ICE shooting victims.
Morello described it as “a concert of solidarity and resistance to defend Minnesota” and against “the rising tide of the state of terror”.
Springsteen was a surprise guest artist. In addition to performing Streets of Minneapolis he played his 1995 song, The Ghost of Tom Joad.
Tom Joad is a character in John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath, about the Dust Bowl migrants from Oklahoma. During the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl migrants left Oklahoma and travelled west, forced off the land by drought and the intensive farming methods. Springsteen’s song describes “the new world order” where homelessness, policing and inequality prevail.
Woody Guthrie also sang about Tom Joad on his 1940 album Dust Bowl Ballads. Guthrie travelled south to California with migrants who scraped a living working in others’ fields and picking fruit in others’ orchards.
Tom Joad is a working class man who stands up to authority through the call for collective action. Guthrie’s two songs about the character featured on Guthrie’s first and most successful recording, bring national attention to the plight of the Dust Bowl farmers.
Guthrie emblazoned on his guitars the slogan “This machine kills fascists”.
When Robert Zimmerman left his parental home in Hibbing, Minnesota, to reinvent himself in New York as Bob Dylan, he achieved his desire to meet Guthrie.
One of Dylan’s very early compositions was The Death Of Emmett Till, which he performed for a Congress on Racial Equality benefit concert in 1962. It didn’t appear on an album until the compilation album Broadside Ballads, Vol.6, in 1972, under his pseudonym Blind Boy Grunt.
Emmett Till was a 14-year-old Black boy who was brutally murdered in 1955 by two white brothers in Mississippi. His murder, and their acquittal by an all white jury, caused public outrage, and became a catalyst of the Civil Rights Movement.