Acoustic Guitar: Bruce Springsteen, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions

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Bruce Springsteen, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions

By Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers

Don’t judge this CD by its title: We Shall Overcome does not pay tribute to Pete Seeger the protest singer, nor is it a rundown of his greatest hits. Instead Springsteen reaches into Seeger’s huge songbag and pulls out familiar themes, like “John Henry” and “Shenandoah”—songs associated more with the public domain than with Seeger or any other artist. What ultimately earns the subtitle “The Seeger Sessions” is the CD’s guiding spirit: the belief that folk music is for sharing, and the more the merrier.

Springsteen threw a musical house party to record these tracks, arranging and calling out solos on the fly with a sprawling band—twin fiddles, banjo, guitar, horns, upright bass, accordion, piano, drums—that sounds as if it has one foot in the Appalachians and the other on the bayou. The songs crackle with energy, from the silly (the minstrel song “Old Dan Tucker”) to the sublime (the roof-raising gospel number “O, Mary, Don’t You Weep”). Springsteen and Frank Bruno anchor the rhythm section with their flattop guitars, and the Boss sings like a man playing hooky from his day job. Springsteen, who did not grow up singing these songs around the campfire, instinctively understands what too many modern folkies forget: that trad music rocks. Packaged as a DualDisc that includes a “making of” DVD, We Shall Overcome got me playing along in no time flat—a tribute that Seeger, our folksinger laureate, would surely appreciate. (Columbia, www.columbiarecords.com)

This article also appears in Acoustic Guitar, July 2006

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