Bruce Springsteen – "Born to Run" (1975)

Someday girl, I don’t know when

We’re gonna get to that place

Where we really want to go

In 1774, the Earl of Dunmore – who had been named colonial Governor of Virginia by King George III – wrote that Americans “for ever imagine the Lands further off are still better than those upon which they are already settled.”

“If they attained Paradise,” he added, “they would move on if they heard of a better place farther west.”

Lord Dunmore

My ancestors migrated from England to Virginia not long after Lord Dunmore wrote those words.  After a few decades there, they packed up and moved to Kentucky and Tennessee – presumably in search of a better life than they were experiencing in Virginia.  

Apparently, they also found life in Kentucky and Tennessee to be somewhat lacking because after a few more decades, they decided that the grass must be greener in Missouri and Arkansas and moved there.  

I’m not sure why they didn’t keep going west until they got to California and “attained Paradise” – which would have been the smart play – but they didn’t.

Of course, the bloom is off the rose when it comes to California, and nowadays a lot of people who are living there are starting to head back east.  But back in the day, California was the place you oughta be if you wanted to live the American dream.

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“Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country,” the newspaperman Horace Greeley famously wrote in 1865. 

When he wrote those words, westward was the way to go if you wanted a better life.  

Horace Greeley

But Greeley’s point wasn’t so much about moving in a particular direction.  It was about being brave enough to pull up stakes and move on when the life you were living wasn’t the life you wanted.

After all, the American dream is about attaining your best possible life – and if that requires getting the hell out of Dodge and looking for opportunities elsewhere, that’s what Americans do.

Including the restless young protagonist of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run.”

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The 250 songs that were chosen for the CBS Sunday Morning “Essential American Songbook” include five by Bruce Springsteen.  But “Born to Run” isn’t one of them. 

You have GOT to be kidding me.  “Born to Run” is clearly Bruce Springsteen’s best record.  (If you don’t agree with me, you and I aren’t going to be friends.)  And it’s a quintessentially American record to boot.

Regular readers of my wildly popular little blog know that 2 or 3 lines is not the biggest fan of “The Boss.”  But I have to admit that Springsteen absolutely nailed it with “Born to Run” – which is one of the 13 songs I’ve chosen to include in the 2 OR 3 LINES QUINTESSENTIAL AMERICAN SONGBOOK.  

The records that I featured in the previous two posts are about roadtrips.  So is today’s featured song – sort of.  

But while “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66” and “I’ve Been Everywhere” celebrate the joy that Americans feel when they get their motors running and head out on the highway***, the protagonist of “Born to Run” isn’t looking for adventure when he hits the road – he’s firing up his chrome-wheeled and fuel-injected chariot out of sheer desperation.

[*** – Recognize that reference to “Born to Be Wild”?  If you’re wondering why that record didn’t make the cut for my quintessential American songbook, it’s because Steppenwolf was more Canadian than American.]

Like many young men, he feels trapped in his dead-end job and his dead-end hometown.  He begs his girlfriend to “break this trap” with him.  We’ll “run ’til we drop,” he tells her.  “Baby, we’ll never go back.”   

Where exactly are they headed?  He doesn’t know, and he doesn’t particularly care.  But he’s betting on it being better than where they are now:

Someday girl, I don’t know when

We’re gonna get to that place

Where we really want to go

And we’ll walk in the sun

 

If getting to that place requires taking a chance – in other words, walking “out on the wire” – so be it.  Chasing the American dream isn’t for the faint-hearted.

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Click here to hear Bruce Springsteen’s masterpiece, “Born to Run.”

 

Click here to buy “Born to Run” from Amazon.

Hank Snow – "I've Been Everywhere" (1962)

Boston, Charleston, Dayton, Louisiana

Washington, Houston, Kingston, Texarkana

Monterey, Ferriday, Santa Fe, Tallapoosa

Glen Rock, Black Rock, Little Rock, Oskaloosa

We Americans love to jump in our cars and hit the open road.  Give us a full tank of gas, a six-pack of beer, and a big nasty redhead by our side (to paraphrase Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.”), and we’re ready to roll!

My previous choice for the 2 OR 3 LINES QUINTESSENTIAL AMERICAN SONGBOOK was “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66,” a classic road-trip song that gives shout-outs to a number of cities situated on that quintessential American highway.

Today’s featured song mentions dozens of other place names – including states, cities, towns, and unincorporated communities.  The singer of “I’ve Been Everywhere” claims to have visited each and every one of them – most likely while hitching rides in eighteen-wheelers (which is another very American thing to do). 

In 2017, Brett Anderson hopped on his motorcycle and took off to visit all the places listed in “I’ve Been Everywhere.”  Click here to read about his 73,000-mile journey, which took two years to complete. 

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“I’ve Been Everywhere” was written by Australian Geoff Mack, so it’s not surprising that the song’s original lyrics featured Australian place names – which are also known as “toponyms.”  

Hank Snow

Canadian-born country singer Hank Snow thought the song could be a hit in the U.S. and Canada if the Australian toponyms were changed to North American ones.  So Mack got out a North American atlas and got to work.

Snow’s recording of the revised song was a number one country hit in 1962.  It was subsequently covered by Johnny Cash, Lynn Anderson, Asleep at the Wheel, and many others – The Simpsons among them.

But I’m featuring Hank Snow’s version in part because he was an immigrant.  He moved to the United States from his native Canada in 1949 to seek his fame and fortune, becoming a naturalized American citizen several years later.  What’s more quintessentially American than an immigrant?

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Click here to listen to Hank Snow’s recording of “I’ve Been Everywhere.”

Click here to buy that recording from Amazon.   

Nat King Cole – "Route 66" (1946)

Now you go through St. Louis

Joplin, Missouri

And Oklahoma City looks mighty pretty!

Is there any more quintessentially American activity than hitting the road and heading west?  That’s why my third (and oldest) choice for the 2 OR 3 LINES QUINTESSENTIAL AMERICAN SONGBOOK is the ne plus ultra of road-trip songs.  

“(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66” was composed in 1946 by Bobby Troup, a jazz pianist, singer, and songwriter who also starred in the seventies medical drama Emergency! along with his second wife, Julie London.  (Not surprisingly, Troup played a doctor and London played a nurse on that show.  Today, he’d probably be the nurse and she’d be the doctor.)

Julie London and Bobby Troup

Troup wrote the song after he and his first wife drove from his home in Pennsylvania to Los Angeles in a 1941 Buick, which used 75 quarts of oil on the ten-day trip.  

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The Troups started on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, but most of their trip was spent on Route 66, which stretched almost 2500 miles between Chicago and Santa Monica, California.  

Along the way, they toured the Meramac Caverns in Missouri (“Jesse James Hideout” was the slogan on that attraction’s numerous billboards), visited the Will Rogers Memorial in Oklahoma, drove through a snowstorm outside Amarillo, Texas, and stopped to take a look at the Hoover Dam.

Troup came up with the idea of writing a song about their trip, but it was his wife who suggested the song’s title.  (I’m not sure who came up with the “Oklahoma City looks mighty pretty” lyric.  Having visited Oklahoma City, I can tell you that they threw accuracy out the window in order to make the line rhyme.)  

Troup took the song to Nat King Cole, who had a big hit with it.  Since then, it has been recorded by Perry Como, Louis Prima, Bing Crosby, Natalie Cole, Asleep at the Wheel, Chuck Berry, the Rolling Stones, Depeche Mode, the Cramps, the Cheetah Girls, John Mayer (for the soundtrack of the movie "Cars") and many, many others.

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I grew up in Joplin, Missouri, which was smack dab on Route 66.  So I was thrilled that Joplin was one of the cities mentioned in the lyrics of “Route 66.”

From the 2010 2 or 3 lines post that featured Cole’s recording of “Route 66”:

All Gaul was divided into three parts.  And all recordings of “Route 66” can be divided into two groups: the ones that say “Joplin, Missouri” (which is part of the original composition) and those that instead say “down to Missouri” or something similar.  

One of my first Rolling Stones albums had a live version of “Route 66,” but Mick Jagger disappointed me by not saying “Joplin, Missouri” when he should have.  (You can click here to listen to it.)  

A Route 66 mural in downtown Joplin

I’m surprised by that because I would have assumed that the Stones had heard the Chuck Berry cover of the song, which does mention Joplin.

One good thing about the song rhyming “Missouri” with “St. Louis”: it promotes the correct pronunciation of my home state.  (It's “Missour-ee,” not “Missour-uh.”)

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James Fallows was the only one of the contributors to the CBS Sunday Morning “Essential American Songbook” to make “Route 66” one of his picks.

Fallows got an early start as a big smarty-pants journalist and author at Harvard, where he was the president of the student newspaper.  After going to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, he became Jimmy Carter’s chief speechwriter at age 27.  He then wrote for Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and many other magazines, and has authored eleven books, one of which won a National Book Award.

So it should come as no surprise that Fallows chose to ignore Sunday Morning’s instruction to nominate no more than three songs for inclusion in the “Essential American Songbook” – instead, he named no fewer than twenty songs. 

James Fallows

A few of his picks – “California Dreamin’,” “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” and “America” from West Side Story – aren’t bad.  But too many of his other choices were predictable in the extreme – e.g., “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “We Shall Overcome,” “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and the Jimi Hendrix version of the “Star-Spangled Banner.”  (Of course, Fallows picked “This Land is Your Land” – which was the song named by more of those queried by Sunday Morning than any other.  )

“Hotel California,” “Sounds of Silence,” and the very odd “Nature Boy” are interesting songs.  But what about them is quintessentially American?

The same could be said about the jazz instrumentals (like “Take Five” and “Giant Steps”) on Fellows’s list.  Dave Brubeck and John Coltrane are great American jazz musicians, but I’m not sure that instrumental records really qualify for the “Essential American Songbook.”

And while I give Fallows kudos for choosing “Route 66,” why did he pick the John Pizzarelli Trio’s cover of the song instead of the Nat King Cole original or the Chuck Berry cover?   (If Fallows wanted a super-swingy jazz version of “Route 66,” he could have chosen Bobby Troup’s.) 

Click here to listen to Nat King Cole’s cover of “Route 66.”

Click here to buy that recording from Amazon.

Creedence Clearwater Revival – "Fortunate Son" (1969)

But when the taxman comes to the door

Lord, the house looks like a rummage sale

I don’t know much about Jelly Roll other than that he has a goofy name and a lot of disturbing tattoos.  (If I’ve ever heard one of his records, it was purely by accident.)

Jelly Roll

But of the 90 actors, athletes, authors, businesspeople, comedians, filmmakers, journalists, musicians, and politicians who were asked by the CBS Sunday Morning show to name three essential Americans songs, Jelly Roll did the best job.

Yes, he ignored CBS’s instructions and picked two songs instead of three.  But as we learned in the previous 2 or 3 lines, it’s very American not to do what they tell you to do.

And the two he picked – Rage Against the Machine “Killing in the Name” and Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son” – exemplify quintessential American character traits as well or better than any other two records I can think of.

That’s why those two records were unanimous choices for the 2 OR 3 LINES QUINTESSENTIAL AMERICAN SONGBOOK.

So kudos to Jelly Roll for a job well done.  You f*cking nailed it, dude!

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There’s a scene in the 1971 movie Big Jake where John Wayne yanks a mouthy young whippersnapper off his horse and shoves him down into a big mud puddle.  “It’s time you learned to respect your betters,” the Wayne character snarls at the smart-ass kid.

Generally speaking, Americans don’t believe they have any betters.  We’re not intimidated by the rich and powerful.  (After all, we plan to be rich and powerful ourselves someday.) 

When our so-called betters try to throw their weight around and get away with something they shouldn’t, we call them out for it.

That’s what John Fogarty did in “Fortunate Son,” which he said was about David Eisenhower – who was the grandson of one President and the son-in-law of another one.  

The sons of the rich and powerful – like Eisenhower – always seemed to be able to find a way to avoid the draft, and the working-class families whose sons were sent to fight (and sometimes die) in Vietnam didn’t like that one little bit.

Eisenhower may have avoided being sent to Vietnam, but he did serve three years in the U.S. Navy (most of which he spent in the Mediterranean on a guided-missile cruiser).

As for Fogerty, he managed to avoid the draft by getting into an Army Reserve unit.  He was stationed stateside for the entirety of his six-month tour of duty.

So maybe Fogerty’s scorn for Eisenhower and all the other “fortunate sons” who knew how to game the system and stay out of harm’s way was a bit hypocritical – that’s what he did, after all.  But being full of sh*t is another quintessential American character trait.  

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Here’s a lightly-edited excerpt from my original 2010 post about “Fortunate Son”:

“Fortunate Son” is near-perfect two-minute-and-twenty-second work of art.  The words, the music, and the performance are all just right.  (Everyone and their brother has covered the song, but there’s nothing like the original.)

Most importantly, the attitude of this song is just right.  John Fogerty is pissed off at the powers that be, and he’s not afraid to let everyone know it.  That attitude makes it not only a quintessential rock-and-roll song, but also a very patriotic song – the Founding Fathers had some issues with the powers that be as well. . . . 

I remember my mother expressing exactly the same sentiment expressed in the lines quoted at the beginning of this post when I was a kid.  (People around here say “garage sale” or “yard sale,” but my mother always said “rummage sale.”)

It may have been possible to cheat on your personal property taxes back in the day by hiding your more valuable possessions when the tax assessor made his yearly visit to your house, although I doubt that many people were able to get away with very much.  But my mother was convinced that the richer people in town were beating the system one way or the other. 

My parents grew up during the Depression, and both of their families had barely enough to get by on.  Not surprisingly, they were somewhat resentful (envious?) of the “silver spoon” types.  

Also not surprising was their frugality when it came to spending their hard-earned money.  We lived in a very modest house – we all had to share one bathroom, which is a horror that my fortunate sons (and daughters) have never had to experience . . . .

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Click here to listen to “Fortunate Son.”

Click here to buy “Fortunate Son” from Amazon.