Song 53: My Hometown, Bruce Springsteen

Bruce Springsteen is an incredible poet. I struggled with the question of whether to include Youngstown in this list instead of My Hometown. Youngstown is a brilliant song that takes you through the hundred and eighty years in the life and death of Jenny, a Youngstown, Ohio steel blast furnace. My Hometown takes you through three decades of a man's life in a dying town. Youngstown is the more overtly political of the two songs, but My Hometown seems to have touched so many people, seems so real to so many people, that it made the cut.

From Youngstown:

Well my daddy worked the furnaces

Kept 'em hotter than hell

I come home from 'Nam worked my way to scarfer

A job that'd suit the devil as well

Taconite, coke and limestone

Fed my children and made my pay

Them smokestacks reachin' like the arms of god

Into a beautiful sky of soot and clay

From My Hometown:

Now main streets whitewashed windows 
and vacant stores
Seems like there aint nobody wants 
to come down here no more
They're closing down the textile mill 

across the railroad tracks

Foreman says these jobs are going boys 

and they aint coming back 

to your hometown