West Side Story (Motion Picture Soundtrack) – "America" (2021)

Skyscrapers bloom in America!

Cadillacs zoom in America!

Industry boom in America!

“Detroit City” tells the story of the many people from the rural South who moved to Detroit after World War II in hopes of achieving the American dream.  

“America” – one of the best songs from West Side Story, which has a number of great ones – is also about young people who have lofty expectations about life in the big city.  In the case of “America,” the city is New York instead of Detroit, and the young dreamers are Puerto Ricans rather than poor Southern whites – but the message of both songs is that the streets are definitely not paved with gold.

At least not for Appalachian trailer trash and Puerto Ricans (whose accents and skin color destine them to second-class treatment despite the fact that they are American citizens).

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West Side Story was originally going to be called East Side Story, and focus on a Romeo-and-Juliet-style relationship between a Jewish girl and a Catholic boy – one that was frowned upon by both set of parents. 

But the Jewish creative team behind the original concept decided that the Jewish-Catholic angle was a bit clichéd.  They chose instead to build the musical around an ethnic conflict, not a religious one.

In Romeo and Juliet, the young lovers belong to two wealthy and powerful families who have hated each other for generations.  Exactly why they hate each other isn’t really clear – the feud has been going on for so long that no one remembers why it started.

The Sharks and the Jets facing off in the
1961 movie version of West Side Story

In West Side Story, the young lovers are tied to rival New York City gangs.  Tony – who is Polish-American – is the head honcho of the Jets, a gang that consists of second- and third-generation working-class whites whose parents were mostly Irish and Italian (with some Eastern Europeans and even a Jew mixed in).  Maria is the sister of the leader of the Sharks, a rival Puerto Rican gang whose members are more recent New York City arrivals.

The Jets represent the traditional powers-that-be in their West Side neighborhood.  The Sharks are upstarts trying to establish a beachhead in their largely hostile new environment.

In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet’s cousin Tybalt kills Romeo’s best friend, Mercutio.  Romeo stabs Tybalt to avenge Mercutio’s death, and then commits suicide because he mistakenly thinks that Juliet is dead.

In West Side Story, Maria’s brother Bernardo kills Riff – Tony’s best friend.  Tony then stabs Bernardo in response, and is later shot in the back by Bernardo’s friend while he is running toward Maria – who he has been told is dead.

In other words, same sh*t, different day.  Or, in this case, same sh*t, different play.

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In 1964, sociologist Milton Gordon coined the term “ladder of assimilation” to describe the process of how an immigrant group integrates itself into the society of its new home.

Cultural assimilation – learning the language and customs of their new country – can take place relatively quickly.  But structural assimilation – that is, winning acceptance into mainstream social circles and achieving economic equality – usually takes much longer.

The worst enemy of the most recently-arrived group of immigrants is usually the second-newest group.  The old guard of any society rarely feels threatened by the newcomers.  But the previous wave of immigrants is probably still struggling to establish itself, and they aren’t likely to show much tolerance for those who have followed them to their new country.

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In the early 1800s, New York City’s political and economic power was mostly in the hands of an Anglo-Protestant elite.  

That began to change after millions of Irish immigrants came to the city to get away from the Great Famine of 1840.  Through the Tammany Hall political machine, Irish-Americans came to dominate local government – especially the police and fire departments.

Italian immigrants arriving at Ellis Island

Although the two groups had a common religion, the Irish did not welcome the massive wave of Italian immigrants who began to arrive in the 1880s.  A decade or so later saw a million Eastern European Jews came to New York City to get away from pogroms.  Eventually the Italians and Jews gained economic traction and won political influence, but it took some time.

In 1965, Congress passed the Hart-Celler Act, which abolished immigration quotas based on national origin.  That opened the door into New York City for almost two million immigrants from the Caribbean, the Indian subcontinent, central Africa, and other areas.  

Today, foreign-born residents account for roughly one-third of New York City’s population.  

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In the words of the newest addition to the 2 OR 3 LINES QUINTESSENTIAL AMERICAN SONGBOOK, skyscrapers bloom, industry booms, and Cadillacs zoom in America – assuming you’re white and have gotten rid of your accent.

Some immigrants will achieve the American dream in spades.  For others, America means twelve young men sharing an apartment and paying outrageously high interest rates on the money you need borrow to get started in a new place.   You’re “free to be anything you choose” as long as you’re happy choosing between low-paying jobs like waiting tables and shining shoes.   

The vast majority of Americans believe in the principle of equality of opportunity.  But opinions differ on whether the government should enforce equality of outcomes – i.e., “equity”:

The Hoover Institution’s David Davenport framed the debate this way:

Is pursuing equality of outcomes consistent with the American understanding of liberty as well as equality?  Is America ready to trade in being “the land of opportunity,” still sought after by millions of immigrants, in order to pursue only equality?  Should government be in the business of equalizing people’s economic or social status and could it even accomplish that if it sought to do so? 

He argues that equality of opportunity is to be preferred because it is consistent with the American tradition of individual liberty, and concludes that “[t]here are reasons to be optimistic about the future of equality of opportunity”: 

For one thing, the American people believe it describes the American dream – and describes it better than equality of outcome or other goals. For another, immigrants by the millions keep coming to America in search of opportunity; they see something here that perhaps long-settled Americans have lost.  

Click here to watch the cast of the 2021 movie version of West Side Story performing “America.”

Click here to buy the recording of that performance from Amazon.

Pretenders – "My City Was Gone" (1982)

I went back to Ohio

But my city was gone

“My City Is Gone” is the third of three records chosen for the 2 OR 3 LINES QUINTESSENTIAL AMERICAN SONGBOOK that feature narrators who have left the towns where they grew up and gone out into the wider world in pursuit of the American dream.

In “Born to Run,” the singer gets his motor runnin’ and heads out on the highway that leads away from his hometown.  He doesn’t know where he’s going, but he’s sure he’ll find a place where he has a better shot at success than the place he’s leaving behind.

In “Detroit City,” the singer has learned the hard way that the grass isn’t always greener on the other side of the fence.  He decides to swallow his pride, admit that life in the big city sort of sucks, and return to the family and friends he left behind.

In “My City Was Gone,” the singer learns that while you can go home again, there’s no guarantee that the home you remember is still going to be there.

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The United States wasn’t the first country to implement large-scale urban renewal, but I think it’s fair to say that no country did it bigger than we did.

You can trace American urban renewal back to the “City Beautiful” movement of the 1890s.  But it didn’t really blow up until the Housing Act of 1949, which was a key part of President Harry Truman’s “Fair Deal.”  

The primary goal of that law was the eradication of big-city slums.  All too often, it was neighborhoods that were mostly populated by black or immigrant families that were defined as slums and bulldozed, which often resulted in large-scale displacement of those communities.

The so-called slums were sometimes redeveloped for commercial or industrial uses, forcing the former residents to go elsewhere to find affordable places to live.  

And when the old slum housing stock was replaced by public housing projects, bad design and poor maintenance sometimes resulted in those projects becoming very unpleasant places to live.  (Cabrini-Green in Chicago and Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis are two notorious examples of public housing gone bad.) 

The Pruitt-Igoe housing project
in St. Louis (now demolished)

Urban renewers also set their sights on downtown shopping districts that had fallen on hard times because they couldn’t compete with suburban shopping malls .  Cities implemented all kinds of different strategies in hopes of revitalizing their downtowns, but there were many more failures than successes.

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Chrissie Hynde grew up in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio – a suburb of Akron.  She moved to London when she was 21, and eventually achieved fame and fortune as the front woman of the Pretenders.

Hynde wrote “My City Was Gone” after returning to Akron to visit family several years after becoming an expatriate.  The song bemoans the fact that South Howard Street – Akron’s main downtown drag – was unrecognizable thanks to urban redevelopment.  “My city had been pulled down” and “reduced to parking spaces,” Hynde wrote.

Chrissie Hynde

And it wasn’t just downtown Akron that had changed.  The “pretty countryside” around Cuyahoga Falls “had been paved down the middle,” and many of the farms in the area “had been replaced by shopping malls.”

“Way to go, Ohio,” Hynde sings scornfully – and believe me, no one does scornful better than Chrissie Hynde.

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When it comes to tearing up downtowns and turning farms into shopping malls, nobody does it better than the United States.  Which is why I’m including “My City Was Gone” in the 2 OR 3 LINES QUINTESSENTIAL AMERICAN SONGBOOK. 

But Hynde’s greatest loss wasn’t South Howard Street or the pretty countryside around Cuyahoga Falls that had been “paved down the middle”:

I went back to Ohio

But my family was gone

I stood on the back porch

There was nobody home

I was stunned and amazed

My childhood memories

Slowly swirled past

Like the wind through the trees

Returning to your childhood home and finding that everything you remember has changed isn’t something that’s a quintessentially American experience – it’s a universally human experience.  

You can’t blame those changes on the Housing Act of 1949 or anything else that the government or the real estate developers did.  

Sooner or later, your parents die and the friends you grew up with move away.

All that remains of your childhood are the memories.

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Click here to hear “My City Was Gone.”

Click here to buy “My City Was Gone” from Amazon.

Bobby Bare – "Detroit City" (1963)

By day I make the cars

By night I make the bars

Between 1940 and 1960, about seven million poor whites took the “Hillbilly Highway” out of Appalachia and settled in Detroit and the other manufacturing centers of the upper Midwest.

An Appalachian family in 1940

One magazine article described the Appalachians as “clannish, proud, disorderly, [and] untamed to urban ways.”  When Detroit residents were surveyed concerning what kind of people they found most undesirable, hillbillies ranked second only to criminals.

Poor whites weren’t the only ones who left the South in the post-World War II period in pursuit of the American dream.  About five million African-Americans emigrated from the South during the forties, fifties, and sixties and moved to the Midwest and West in the hope of finding not only higher-paying jobs, but escaping “Jim Crow” segregation.

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The previous 2 or 3 lines featured “Born to Run,” a song sung by a young man who was eager to leave behind the limitations of life in his hometown and strike out for a new place where he could achieve the American dream.  He doesn’t know where that place is, but he’s sure there’s a better life for him out there somewhere. 

Today’s featured song picks up that young man’s life a few years later, when he’s beginning to think that maybe life back home wasn’t so bad after all.

Postwar Detroit may have been a place where even a poor, uneducated Southerner could make some serious do-re-mi working in a Ford or GM factory, but leaving behind your family and friends was a high price to pay for a well-paying job.  

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Bob Dylan’s 2022 book, The Philosophy of Modern Song, consists of short, impressionistic essays on 66 very different records – everything from “Mack the Knife” to “My Generation” to “Viva Las Vegas” to “Ball of Confusion” to “The Whiffenpoof Song.”

“Detroit City” was the very first of the 66 songs that Dylan wrote about in that book.  Here’s part of what he had to say about it:

In this song you’re the prodigal son.  

You went to sleep last night in Detroit City. . . . From the postcards [that you sent home], everybody assumes you’re a bigwig, that things are cool and beautiful, but they’re not, and the disgrace of failure is overwhelming.  Your life is unraveling.

You’re going to take your foolish self-love and egotism and go back to what’s familiar, back to the ones that’ll stand by you . . . You’re going back to where you can clear your life up, going back to people of understanding.  The people who know you best. 

But Dylan thinks the singer is just fooling himself if he thinks that going back to where he came from is going to make everything right again:

This is not so much the song of a dreamer, but the song of someone who is caught up in a fantasy of the way things used to be.  But the listener knows that it just doesn’t exist.  There is no mother, no dear old papa, sister, or brother.  They are all either dead or gone.  The girl he’s dreaming about got married to a divorce attorney and she has three kids.  Like thousands of others he left the farm, came to the big city to get ahead, and got lost.

Thomas Wolfe famously said “You can’t go home again.”  Dylan agrees with him.

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“Detroit City” was a top ten country hit for Bobby Bare in 1963, winning the Grammy for Best Country & Western Recording.

Country-soul artist Arthur Alexander – the only songwriter whose songs have been recorded by the Beatles, Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan – covered “Detroit City” in 1965.  

As one reviewer noted, the message of that song – that you might come to regret your decision to leave home and head to Detroit (or wherever) in search of greener pastures – is one that black Americans could relate to every bit as much as poor Southern whites.

None of the dopes who suggested songs for the CBS Sunday Morning “Essential American Songbook” mentioned “Detroit City.”  But that record was good enough to be the first one that Bob Dylan wrote about in his book, and it’s good enough to be included in the 2 OR 3 LINES QUINTESSENTIAL AMERICAN SONGBOOK.  

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Click here to listen to Bobby Bare’s 1963 recording of “Detroit City.”

Click here to buy that recording from Amazon.

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.