"We Shall Overcome: The Pete Seeger Sessions" Reviewed by Piers Mostyn I'm not a big Bruce fan. I accept that he is an authentic voice of blue-collar America's post-Vietnam malaise. I accept that he has not just rested on his "rock god" laurels to beef up back-catalogue sales.
I remember when he invited Women Against Pit Closures to a gig in Britain during the miners' strike and gave them a fat cheque in a quiet gesture backstage.
The trouble is, he's not my style most of the time. I often can't get beyond his 1970s hubristic stadium rock.
At first, when I saw the sepia toned cover of his new album, I thought this sounds like radical nostalgia backed up by New Orleans trad. So l wasn't inclined to get excited.
But when my younger daughter bought me the CD, I actually listened to it and completely abandoned my prejudices.
These are covers of songs associated with radical folk singer Pete Seeger. Four decades ago he was one of the voices, along with Woody Guthrie and others, whose protest songs from a broad range of sources in the American tradition helped give cultural expression to the first wave of post-war radicalisation.
Springsteen put together a 13-piece band including violin, brass and accordion. A "live" feel is achieved through recording it all in 3 one-day sessions with no rehearsals -all arrangements were conducted as they played.
It sounds like a raggededged marching band in the middle of a field - with Bruce's growling and passionate vocals pumping through the middle..
When he belts out "John Henry" about the building of the railroads you wonder why microphones were ever invented.
The songs reflect the richness of the US tradition of cultural resistance - Irish balads, spirituals sung against slavery and for civil rights, songs of the dustbowl and depression. It's an alternative history.
When he sings "All foreign wars I do proclaim/Live on blood and/A mother's pain/l'd ratner nave my son as ne uscu to be/Than the King of America/And his whole Navy" -described as "strongly associated with the Irish republicans and the Easter Rising of 1916" - the links to Iraq are implicit.
For all that, the tradition is richer still than this collection. Ry Cooder's recent Chavez Ravine brilliantly celebrated the resistance of a Latino community in Los Angeles in the 1950s when its suburb was razed to build the new Dodgers stadium.
And there must be many Yiddish songs, reflecting the radicalism of Jewish migrants whose socialism contributed so much to the flowering of the US left a hundred years ago.
Springsteen admits that, amazingly, he only discovered Seeger in 1997 - the spark that led to this journey. Hopefully one that will lead a lot further.
On the other hand, the focus on Seeger is in itself subversive. Like Warren Beatty's "Reds" about the involvement of John Reed in the Russian Revolution, he is celebrating the life of an American Communist.
A bold move from an artist in his fourth decade at the top.
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