Bruce Springsteen (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

“His songs will last as long as other people can see themselves in his songs.”–June Skinner Sawyers

A few of the regular contributors to this blog kid each other and the readers about “There’s always a Lowell connection” to subjects and persons that come through the digital window open to the public here. A new book that offers a three-layered lens with which to view the artistic work of Bruce Springsteen has one of those Lowell connections. I’ll play out that local link at the end.

“We Take Care of Our Own” by June Skinner Sawyers is her fifth book about aspects of Springsteen. In this one she examines “Faith, Class, and Politics in the Art of Bruce Springsteen,” a kind of capsule biography in fewer than 150 pages. The book is concise and dense at the same time and includes footnotes and an extensive bibliography. Published by Rutgers University Press in New Jersey, it’s not surprising that a university publisher brought out the book. The author cites popular culture commentators and high-minded thinkers in a smart, wide-ranging portrait of one of the important public figures of the crossover decades of late 20th c. and early 21st c. American life. (And he’s got a world audience also.) The chapters are short, each introduced by a photograph loaded with meaning (not fan pics of the singer).

Spirituality (a complex Catholic experience), economic status (from his hometown to every town), and citizenship (an evolving civic engagement aimed at social justice), are explored by the author whose text brims with references to Andrew M. Greeley, David Brooks, Elvis Costello, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Barbara Ehrenreich, Paul Krugman, Kurt Loder, Kathleen Norris, Joyce Carol Oates, Barack Obama, Thomas Piketty, Robert D. Putnam, Patti Smith, J. D. Vance, and many more. Skinner Sawyers places The Boss in a line of American greats that includes Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck.

If you know a lot about Springsteen, like Pat Cook of Middlesex Community College who has witnessed umpteen concerts by the E Street Band and its leader, or have only a passing acquaintance with the music superstar, I recommend reading this account of the Gospel of Bruce, which is one way to think about the book. The faith and politics are entwined with an acute consciousness of economic class, the distribution of civic power, and a larger search for meaning at the bottom or top of anyone’s mind. Skinner Sawyers doesn’t claim that Springsteen has an answer to settle the question of how we should live, but through his example she makes a case for continued searching and finding a way to live with partial answers if that’s the best available to us.

What’s the Lowell connection here? Well, The Boss did perform at Lowell Memorial Auditorium in 1996, November 14. But for this book, we have UMass Lowell Professor of English and best-selling author Andre Dubus III providing the Afterword. June Skinner Sawyers invited him to add his thoughts, knowing that he had quoted from “Born to Run” in the front of what she calls his “glorious memoir ‘Townie.'” Acknowledging the impact of Springsteen’s words and music on him as a young man, ten years younger than Bruce, Dubus writes:

“And perhaps what draws me and millions of others to Springsteen’s work is that he has never tried to deny that this often blinding fog [of what it means to be human] exists, that so much of our lives are lived in mystery marked by suffering but also buoyed with daily moments of loving illumination.”

The award-winning author of “House of Sand and Fog” and recent books “Such Kindness” (a novel) and “Ghost Dogs” (essays) winds up his brief commentary with a simple notion: “Why not look out for each other? Why not take care of our own?”

And a final point from this reviewer: Even if some people might hear an echo of a lately familiar term, this stance of Springsteen’s, this value set shaped over his lifetime, is not the same as “America First.” The book makes this crystal clear.