Bruce Springsteen’s Only the Strong Survive is generally considered an album of the singer’s youthful favorites, but two of its songs–including the title track–are by an artist that had flown relatively under his radar.
“I wasn’t super familiar with Jerry Butler until I went searching for material for this record,” Springsteen told Asbury Park Press interviewer Chris Jordan last year. “Jon Landau was the huge Jerry Butler fan and he suggested ‘Hey, Western Union Man’ and I said I don’t know.”
Springsteen had never heard the song before, but trusting his manager he listened to it. “It was kind of complicated, and then I got into it really deeply.”
It is a bit complicated. Butler wrote the song with legendary songwriters Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff. (The three also collaborated on “Only the Strong Survive.”) They gave the song a Philly soul groove, but its gimmick is the chorus change-up that briefly kicks the song into a staccato rhythm that sounds exactly like the musical equivalent of a Western Union telegram.
(For the young’uns: telegrams were Morse code messages transmitted over long distances by electrical impulses in pre-Internet, pre-telephone days (although some 17 million telegrams are still sent annually even today).)
The gimmick worked. “Hey, Western Union Man” cut through the radio clutter and clawed its way to #16 on the Billboard Hot 100 and all the way to the top of the R&B chart. It was novel and popular enough that both The Supremes and William Bell (both of whom are also represented on Only the Strong Survive) covered the song as album tracks in the year or two after the song’s release.
Neither cover was released as a single, and “Hey, Western Union Man” went largely uncovered after that until Landau introduced it to Springsteen more than fifty years later.
Bruce’s cover hews pretty closely to Butler’s original, preserving the arrangement and taking very few lyrical liberties. It’s a wise choice: the arrangement is a key ingredient to the song’s recipe.
“Hey, Western Union Man” converted Springsteen into a Butler fan. He ended up covering not only the two Butler songs that grace his latest album, but (as he told NPR in a December 2022 interview) “several other of the songs” from Butler’s 1968 album, The Iceman Cometh.
Although he gave no specifics, I’m betting we’ll hear Butler’s “Never Give You Up” on Bruce’s rumored follow-up cover album–hopefully someday soon.
Hey, Western Union Man
Recorded: 2021
Released: Only the Strong Survive (2022)
Never performed
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“Only the Strong Survive” is part of “Elvis in Memphis”, one of the definitive Blue Eyed Soul releases and canonised as the best long form Elvis as well as among the most revered albums in general. Therefore it’s not as deep a cut as the “Western Union Man”.