“All Crookedly Blessed in God’s Mercy”

Bruce Springsteen has repeatedly reinvented himself through a long process of vocational discernment that often draws on a distinctly Catholic imagination. In this process, he has repeatedly explored complex relationships between religious faith, American identity, older traditions of popular music, and race. At pivotal moments in his career, his vocational discernment has led him to the work of musicians raised in Pentecostal and Holiness churches. From this perspective, this essay explores the relationship between Springsteen’s “Land of Hope and Dreams” and Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s “This Train,” the gospel-inspired song that she first recorded in 1938. Both of these songs arise from Christian imaginations nurtured in local communities of faith—in Tharpe’s case, a congregation of the Church of God in Christ in Cotton Plant, Arkansas, and in Springsteen’s case, an immigrant Catholic parish in Freehold, New Jersey. Tharpe draws directly from Holiness traditions, combining her belief in a distinctly embodied version of sanctification with the religious practice of tongues speaking, most powerfully in her guitar improvisations. Like Springsteen, Tharpe brings to contemporary music the performance dynamics of Holiness and Pentecostal preachers, possessed by the Holy Spirit, accompanied by a choir, before an enraptured congregation. In these respects, the resemblances between these two songs are not a matter of “direct influence.” Rather, these resemblances provide a critical test case in a kind of artistic influence that is multi-directional, unpredictable, and often subversive. They arise from shared sources, particularly a long tradition of train songs that find their way into country and gospel music. Even more important, they arise from similarities in the faith traditions—and the religious imaginations—of the two musicians. From this perspective, Tharpe and Springsteen both belong to a larger tradition of “gospel redemption” in American popular music, which becomes particularly evident when “Land of Hope and Dreams” ends with a cover of Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get Ready,” invoking the ideals of the early civil rights movement and, at the same time, our repeated failures to achieve these ideals.