Album Companion: We Shall Overcome

On September 23, 1997, Bruce Springsteen threw himself a 48th birthday party.

He’d recently bought a house on an expansive property in Colts Neck, New Jersey, but he’d been more or less continually on tour since 1995 and hadn’t had a chance to enjoy it. With the Ghost of Tom Joad Tour behind him, Bruce decided to hold an outdoor fiesta for his family and friends, and he needed a band for the occasion.

Family friend Soozie Tyrell (who hadn’t yet joined the E Street Band) knew a band in the city that might fit the bill: The Gotham Playboys, an eclectic acoustic combo with a New Orleans sound.

The Gotham Playboys was a five-man band: Jeremy Chatzky on upright bass, Sam Bardfeld on violin, Larry Eagle on percussion, Will Holshouser on accordion, and founder Arthur Suydam (yes, Marvel Comics fans, that Arthur Suydam). The party was a success and the band was a hit, especially with the party’s host and celebrant.

While Bruce was celebrating with the Playboys, attorney/activist/record producer Jim Musselman was putting together a new project. Believing that music had the power to change hearts and galvanize action, Musselman envisioned a tribute to one of his greatest musical activist heroes: folk singer icon Pete Seeger.

Musselman recruited an all-star line-up of artists to participate: Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt agreed to contribute, as did Roger McGuinn, the Indigo Girls, Nanci Griffith, and Ani Difranco. The biggest name he had his eye on, though, was Bruce Springsteen.

Bruce was intrigued. He was no stranger to folk music, of course, but his wheelhouse was modern, post-Dylan folk. Musselman sent Bruce a tape of fourteen Seeger songs to give him a sense of what he was looking for, and Bruce was immediately fascinated. “Growing up a rock ’n’ roll kid,” he wrote in his 2016 autobiography, “I didn’t know a lot about Pete’s music or the depth of his influence. But once I started listening, I was overwhelmed by the wealth of songs, their richness and their power. It changed what I thought I knew about ‘folk music.'”

His daughter Jessica’s attention was captured, too. Pete Seeger remembers Bruce telling him that his (at the time) ten-year-old daughter heard him playing Seeger’s records and said, “Hey, that sounds like fun.” All of a sudden, Bruce said, “I pricked up my ears.”

His newfound appreciation for Seeger-era folk helped Bruce realize that while that music held considerable power and relevance for a modern audience, successfully conveying it would require some re-contextualizing for modern ears.

Bruce agreed to contribute a song to the project but knew he needed a band more suited for folk than rock to back him up. He called up the Playboys–three of whom were available– and only six weeks or so after their birthday gig, Chatzky, Bardfeld, and Eagle were back at the Springsteen property to record. He’d wanted to hire Holshouser too, because he wanted that accordion sound on the project–but Will had prior commitments and recommended a player named Charlie Giordano instead.

Bruce had his New Orleans combo, but how can you have a New Orleans sound without a horn section? Bruce called up longtime Jukes/Miami Horns members Ed Manion and Richie “La Bamba” Rosenberg to join the proceedings. “Cousin” Frank Bruno on guitar, Soozie Tyrell on violin, and Patti Scialfa on guitar and backing vocals rounded out the eclectic ensemble.

Bruce chose “We Shall Overcome” as his contribution for Musselman’s project, but that wasn’t the first song the ad hoc group tackled. “We set up next to one another in the living room of our farmhouse (horns in the hall),” recalled Bruce in Born to Run, “counted off the opening chords to ‘Jesse James’ and away we went.” Kevin Buell captured the session on a tripod-mounted video camera, a snippet of which can be seen in The Seeger Sessions documentary.

In all, the group recorded six songs that day: “We Shall Overcome,” “Jesse James” “My Oklahoma Home,” and “Hobo’s Lullaby” would all see eventual release (the last as an overdubbed duet with Pete Seeger); “I Come and Stand at Every Door” and “Pretty Boy Floyd” remain unreleased to this day.

“We Shall Overcome” ended up on Musselman’s project, released in 1998 on the tribute album Where Have All The Flowers Gone?

Bruce put the other tracks away for safekeeping. “I sat on them for almost a decade, but from time to time I kept being drawn back to them. They weren’t quite like anything else I’d cut before and their freshness kept commanding my ear.”

In particular, they commanded his ear in 2004. After the unhappy results of the Vote for Change Tour, Bruce and Jon Landau turned their attention to a second Tracks collection of unreleased material. They listened to the five unreleased tracks from that 1997 session, but Landau in particular thought the tracks were different enough in sound that they warranted a release of their own.

The problem, of course, is that five tracks does not an album make.

So in a scramble before setting out on his year-long Devils & Dust solo acoustic tour, Bruce assembled one of his largest ensembles yet to flesh out a potential Americana album. As luck would have it, every one of the original artists from that 1997 recording session was around and available that day in 2005. Bruce added Art Baron on trombone and Mark Pender on trumpet to add heft to the brass section.

The heart of the album was recorded that day: “Old Dan Tucker,” “Mrs. McGrath,” “Erie Canal,” “O Mary Don’t You Weep,” “John Henry,” “Shenandoah,” “Pay Me My Money Down,” “Froggie Went A Courtin’” and the still-unreleased “Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore” were all captured in a single one-day session that Thom Zimny filmed for posterity.

The second session was just as informal as the first: no rehearsing and the on-the-fly arrangements, with Bruce providing in-the-moment-guidance to his players shortly before rolling the tape.

Bruce still didn’t feel like he had enough material to choose from, but he had a tour waiting so once again the recordings went into the vault. Not for long this time, though–once his acoustic tour wrapped, Bruce almost immediately reassembled his players (adding yet another player, vocalist Lisa Lowell) and recorded another eight songs: “Jacob’s Ladder,” “Buffalo Gals,” “Eyes on the Prize,” “How Can I Keep From Singing,” “Bring ‘Em Home,” “If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song)” and the still unreleased “Worried Man Blues.” They also recorded an original Springsteen song that day–a version of “American Land” that remains unheard to this day.

“Everything on the record was cut in those three one-day sessions,” the famously perfectionist Springsteen marveled, “mostly first or second takes, all live and with a band I’d never played a note with before they showed up at our farm barn dance.” The sessions were remarkably, intentionally loose–Bruce leaned into the New Orleans vibe by plying his players with alcohol to create the barroom sound he was looking for, and by taking them outside to inspire spontaneity.

Bruce titled the completed album We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions after the song that gave rise to the project, and he released it only three months after the final recording session to enthusiastic critical praise and a somewhat less enthusiastic (but respectfully polite and appreciative) reception from his fan base. (The album peaked only as high as #3 on the Billboard Hot 100.) It went on to win the Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album at the Grammy Awards the following year.

A tour was announced even before the album was released, a tour that would prove to be one of the shortest but most joyous of Bruce’s career. All of the studio artists were able to make at least some of the shows, but Greg Liszt, Clark Gayton, and Curt Ramm eventually stepped in to replace Clifford, Rosenberg, and Pender. And because there still weren’t enough musicians on stage, Bruce hired Curtis King, Cindy Mizelle, Marty Rifkin, and Marc Anthony Thompson to round out the touring Sessions Band.

The Seeger Sessions Tour spanned a mere 56 shows–only 20 of which were in the country that originated the predominantly folk set list–with bigger and more enthusiastic audiences in Europe than in the U.S. (a notable exception being the legendary New Orleans Jazz Fest show that opened the tour).

As the tour went on, Bruce infused creative new arrangements of his original material while introducing re-written folk songs like “How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?” and the brand-new “American Land” along with additional classics like “This Little Light of Mine.”

Bruce felt strong enough about a few of the new additions to include live versions of them on a second edition of the album, released later that same year as an “American Land Edition.”

Sixteen years down the road without a reprise, most fans consider the We Shall Overcome era a relative blip in Springsteen’s long and storied career, but the fact that it generated two official releases, an EP, a live album, and two full-length concert video documents testifies to the affection Bruce has for the material and the ephemeral band that brought it to life.

Bruce has occasionally spoken of his desire to revisit that era, though, so for fans like me who consider the album and tour to be among his very best, hope remains for an encore endeavor someday.