One of Springsteen’s most head-scratching penchants is for pairing dark lyrics with melodies so upbeat that you’ll find yourself dancing, singing, and celebrating some low or pitiful characters.
We fist-pump and chant while Bruce sings about a down-and-out Vietnam vet in “Born in the U.S.A.” We sing along while Bruce crowd-surfs his way through “Hungry Heart,” a song about a home-wrecking, family-abandoning philanderer.
And then there’s “Working on the Highway,” a staple of pretty much every tour since 1985, a reliable crowd-pleaser, and IMHO the best song ever written about statutory rape. (Although “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” by The Police is right up there.)
Admittedly, you really have to pay attention to the lyrics to catch the drift, because at casual listen, it sure sounds like “Working on the Highway” is a rockabilly celebration of letting loose after a long week of manual labor:
Friday night’s pay night guys fresh out of work
Talking about the weekend scrubbing off the dirt
Some heading home to their families, some are looking to get hurt
Some going down to Stovell wearing trouble on their shirts
The narrator is doing none of the above, however, even though he’s just another guy “working for the county out on 95” (Interstate 95, most likely). He gets through the workday thinking about his “pretty little miss” and leading a better life than the one he’s living now.
He reminisces about how he met his pretty young miss at a union hall dance, how he courted her, saved up his money, and asked her daddy for permission. Daddy replies:
“Son, can’t you see that she’s just a little girl?
She don’t know nothing about this cruel, cruel world!”
So the narrator absconds down to Florida with his girl, and everything was jake until
One day, her brothers came and got her, and they took me in a black-and-white.
The prosecutor kept the promise that he made on that day
and the judge got mad and he put me straight away.
…and to drive home the point that this is present, not past:
I wake up every morning to the work bell clang
Me and the warden go swinging on the Charlotte County road gang
Woo-hoo-hoo! Everybody dance!
Seriously.
Did I ruin the song for you? Sorry about that. Hey, maybe we can just assume that the girl was of age and that the narrator got picked up for some other crime. That might plausibly satisfy the lyrics, right?
Except that like many Springsteen songs, “Working on the Highway” evolved both lyrically and musically before it reached its final form on Born in the U.S.A.
Give a listen to its seldom-heard forerunner, called (seriously) “Child Bride.”
Well, that kind of settles that, doesn’t it? Lyrically, it’s essentially the same song as “Working on the Highway,” with only a few lines dropped for the released version. (I actually think “They said she was too young; she was no younger than I’ve been” is a fantastic line, though. The song is weaker without it.)
Pretty amazing how the slower melody lets the meaning of the lyrics leap out at you, though.
“Child Bride” was one of the songs Bruce recorded by himself in his house during the legendary Nebraska sessions, which in retrospect we now realize was most likely a depressive period of isolation following the original River tour. It was one of the few songs from those acoustic recordings that Bruce was able to figure out an electric arrangement for, and thanks to that, “Child Bride” leapt from Nebraska to Born in the U.S.A. and became “Working on the Highway” and the concert favorite we know and love (even if we’re a little creeped out when he sings it to kids like in the clip below).
You’re welcome.
Working on the Highway
Recorded (“Child Bride” version): Dec 1981/Jan 1982
Recorded (final version): May 1982
Released: Born in the U.S.A. (1984)
First Performed: June 29, 1984 (St. Paul, MN)
Last Performed: November 6, 2023 (New York City, NY)
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