Down to the River
The Boss had to make an appearance on my site; since I’m still riding the Bruce train after seeing him perform at Gillette, I figured now is prime time to keep my focus on him. I inherited my love for Bruce from my uncle, who used to say, “Who’s the Boss?” to our resounding chant “Bruce Springsteen!” He’d always add, “Who else?”for our inevitable chorus of our uncle’s name. Sometimes the order was in reverse, but there were always two right answers to his question. I shouted those responses with full conviction that these were indeed two of the greatest men alive. I still believe they are.
My love for Bruce has only grown with time. He’s evolved from this larger than life figure, who occupied the same realm in my mind as Michael Jordan and US Army Rangers (other childhood heroes encouraged by my uncle) to one of the most intuitive, heart-driven artists I follow. He’s an American icon, that much is a fact. Both Taylor Swift and Eric Church include his name in their own lyrics as something synonymous with listening to America put to music. He also embodies the quintessential victory story of moving his way up from hardship to success through hard work and using his known talents.
James Clear has something worthy to say about choosing your career path based on talent and experience. I read Atomic Habits earlier this year when my brother mailed me his copy on a loan. I finally returned the book, so I don’t have the quote I’m thinking of in front of me, but Clear says something to the tune of this: if you can identify your passion, your talent, and your unique experience, you can set yourself on a path to success in doing something you love and are good at. I think that’s exactly what Bruce did. He combined the lifelong passion he had for performing and playing guitar with his generations-old lived experience of life in working class New Jersey. And he became the Boss.
Objectively, Springsteen doesn’t have the prettiest voice. He’s rough sounding. He was even voted out of his first band. If you’ve seen Dead Poets Society or just happen to know about the manner in which J. Evans Pritchard ranks poetry, you’ll know what I mean when I say that Bruce would not have scored so well on something like a Pritchard scale for music. What Bruce has transcends traditional modes of measuring music. Bruce sings with soul and honesty and a deep understanding of what it is to have lived in and through hardship and to keep living and loving through it all.
The Boss has never failed to supply a song to soundtrack what I’m feeling or which stage in life I’m going through. Nostalgic for childhood? ‘My Hometown’. In love? ‘Thunder Road’. Heartbroken? ‘Sad Eyes’. Lonely? ‘Human Touch’. Feeling stuck in life? ‘Dancing in the Dark’. Feeling on top of it? ‘The Promised Land’. Your relationship isn’t the same as it once was? ‘I’m Going Down’. Not sure anyone really gets you? ‘Brilliant Disguise’. Think you found someone who finally does get it? ‘If I Should Fall Behind’ or ‘I’ll Stand By You’. You just want to feel the love? ‘Hungry Heart’. In need of some hope that it’ll get better? ‘Land of Hope and Dreams’. Bruce gets it even if no one else seems to.
From my first listen, ‘The River’ captivated me with its haunting sound, its melancholic lyrics and the emotion that slowly devastates as the story unravels. It’s sad but beautiful, and it convinced me that Springsteen understood what it meant to live in the wake of unborn dreams and shattered expectations. Turns out, Springsteen did draw from personal experience when writing this song, which was influenced by the marriage story of his sister. The hasty marriage of Virginia to Michael Shave after an unplanned pregnancy when she was only seventeen provided much of the content for ‘The River’, which examines the emotions of it all from the point of view of the young man who enters this marriage as an act of obligation rather than something he truly wants in his life.
The sharp whine of harmonica cuts into the guitar strumming before the lyrics begin, setting a mood of melancholy and nostalgia. The harmonica has an interesting history of its own worth mentioning here, because its use in ‘The River’ echoes its significance culturally. Originally invented by German clockmakers, the harmonica was used in traditional European waltzes and marches. In 20th century America, black musicians in the south adopted a different method of playing this instrument that fit with their traditions. In an interview with Smithsonian Magazine, producer Barry Lee Pearson comments on this revolution of the harmonica’s sound:
If you play a harmonica backwards—that is, suck air in, in what is now called “cross harp” or “second position”—you can take notes and force them down a pitch or two. It’s really a completely different technique. It coincides with this love for instruments to sound like the voice, to make the instrument say what you say, and to make it warmer, more expressive of the voice’s emotional timbres. In the blues, a harmonica can cry and whoop and holler.
A harmonica can cry. That’s what’s happening in the opening riff of ‘The River’. The harmonica cries while the guitar soothes, neither one drowning the other out, a coexistence that brilliantly lays the backdrop for the song’s message. This song isn’t about denial of the hardship; it’s about sitting with it, looking at it and seeing it for what it is. It legitimizes a real struggle without calling it ugly.
Bruce leads us into this struggle, introducing his narrator in the first person by means of his origin: “I come from down in the valley/ Where, mister, when you’re young/ They bring you up to do/ Like your daddy done.” With these lyrics, Springsteen gives us a narrator from a generations-deep way of living. Think of all the mannerisms, traumas, social identities, values and other elements of self that we inherit from our parents and their parents. That’s where this narrator comes from. From a place where the young are raised to do as their elders have done since the beginning of it all. Considering how this song applies to recovery, you could look at how generational trauma plays a huge role in many instances of addiction. We can inherit harmful ways of communicating, handling emotion, viewing ourselves, and interacting with others without even knowing where they came from. The odds of developing a substance use disorder are significantly higher for people who grew up in alcoholic homes, and a high percentage of anyone with a substance use disorder is attributed to genetics. I don’t know if I necessarily believe there’s a special gene just for alcoholism, but I think that the genes and customs we inherit play a huge role in it.
Bruce’s narrator sings about meeting Mary in high school, recalling, “We’d drive out of this valley/ Down to where the fields were green.” This idea of escaping the valley of his origin becomes central to the role of the river as the lyrics continue. Bruce has used the adverb “down” a second time, and its placement deserves some attention here. The narrator grew up “down in the valley” and is now trying to escape the valley by driving “down to where the fields were green.” Down, by nature of comparison, has negative connotations. It implies sinking lower, losing strength, wallowing at the bottom. The narrator thinks he’s able to escape the essence of living in the valley, but doesn’t realize the illusion of a geographic cure. He can’t escape the “down” of the valley, because that’s not the part he thought he needed to escape. Even the image of green fields conjures the old adage that grass seems greener on the other side. It’s an illusion.
Now Bruce brings in the title lines: “We’d go down to the river/ And into the river we’d dive/ Oh-oh down to the river we’d ride.” In my analysis of ‘The River’ in the language of recovery, this river that the narrator will visit again and again is drinking. Drinking for him begins as a means of escaping the valley he’s grown up and feels stuck in. Drinking begins as something that can take him outside of that dismal existence along with Mary, the girl he’s found an attraction if not love for. That’s what drinking or using any substance of choice promises in the beginning, an easy means of escape from life down in the valley of accumulated sorrows and the heaviness of life. We don’t realize we’re diving down.
The story continues: “Then I got Mary pregnant/ And, man, that was all she wrote/ And for my nineteenth birthday/ I got a union card and a wedding coat./ We went down to the courthouse/ And the judge put it all to rest./ No wedding day smiles, no walk down the aisle,/ No flowers, no wedding dress./ That night we went down to the river,/ And into the river we’d dive/ Oh-oh, down to the river we did ride, ay-ay-ay.”
We hear this devastating piece of news followed by a drastic life change. What could have been two happy occasions - a pregnancy and a marriage - becomes a life sentence of sorts for two unprepared teenagers who are wed without flowers or smiles. To cope with this turn, they escape down to the river. Diving into the river becomes a practice of turning to a mind-numbing substance to alleviate the grief at this loss of their imagined lives. The narrator, and presumably Mary, feel that their freedom and youth have been stolen by life circumstances, and they now face a future in the valley of their parents that they once dreamt of escaping. The only way they know how to cope with the tremendous weight and horror of this vision is immersion in the same river they made part of their lives back when their dreams of escape seemed more within reach.
The river functions on a level the lyrics don’t even explore explicitly, but they don’t have to. The whole experience of diving into a river reflects the experience of drinking abusively when developed into an extended metaphor. The river is cold, constantly moving, unfathomable, and it contains a deadly strength in its current. For those who abuse alcohol, the substance numbs emotions into a cold, unfeeling state. It is a progressively worsening disease of the mind, body and spirit. It can’t be completely explained by any scientific facts. And the cycle of addiction, once entered, is much too strong for any one person to swim in for long on his or her own.
Accompanied by the crying harmonica, the narrator’s story moves into the quiet desperation of the valley life: “I got a job working construction/ For the Johnstown Company/ But lately there ain’t been much work/ On account of the economy./ Now all them things that seemed so important/ Well, mister, they vanished right into the air./ Now I just act like I don’t remember/ Mary acts like she don’t care.” Here’s that feeling that everything has gone downhill, and the only way to survive the hell of it is to act like none of that matters. The narrator and his wife mourn the past as it was and the life that never was, but they can’t let themselves be honest and connected in their mourning because of the shame and futility of it. The things that seemed so important are all the things the narrator, Mary, and we thought would bring us happiness and escape. We know what these things are. Monetary success, fame, beauty, a perfect grade, a boyfriend, the perfect job, a nice car, another drink. The things we imagined would save us from ourselves but that in reality had so little a foundation in our truth that they could vanish right into the air with as much ease as a bubble popping when it came down to it.
The narrator allows himself to revisit the past in his mind like a private graveside visit: “But I remember us driving in my brother’s car/ Her body tan and wet down at the reservoir./ At night on them banks I’d lie awake/ And pull her close just to feel each breathe she’d take./ Now those memories come back to haunt me/ They haunt me like a curse.” This scene reminds me of how we can glorify the past and grieve the loss of our drinking selves when we recall the good times that those drinking selves had. I remember visiting my own memories like that sometimes. Drinking a beer on the hammock in September curled next to a boyfriend. Sharing a bottle of wine over girl talk. Getting dressed up to visit a vineyard with friends. These memories linger in the reservoir of my drinking past.
Unlike the river, the reservoir is stagnant. It appears calm and reflective on the surface. It is a contained collection of water with no vicious current. But it is only in recollection of this golden moment that the narrator mentions the reservoir, and that same truth holds for us in recovery when we look back on the shimmering surface level good times that our substance use allowed us. Yes, there may have been mo ments of connection when we held someone close, closer than the water that stood near us. But once we dove into the river, really submerged ourselves in the river, the reservoir moments died and only exist for us now as ghosts of a life we weren’t meant to live. Those moments you can look back on like pictures in an album are the reservoir ghosts. We only see the seeming joy like light shimmering on the water’s surface, and we miss the cold depths and building issues beneath it all.
I’ve read a few analyses that call the river in this song a metaphor for the narrator’s dreams. At first I thought that this interpretation couldn’t work with my intention of analyzing the river as a metaphor for drinking or addiction. On further reflection, I find that both fit well together. Both, when used as escapes, simultaneously allow an illusion of departure from the now and intensify a feeling of disillusionment and discontent with the now.
Bruce poses a haunting question at this point: “Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true?/ Or is it something worse./ That sends me down to the river/ Though I’d know the river is dry/ That sends me down to the river tonight…”
That’s the line that sticks with me. The narrator has this lurking sense of the horror that drives him to the escape of the river, but he can’t name it as anything more than something worse. The speaker even acknowledges that the river is dry, which doesn’t mean the alcohol has run out. It means the effectiveness of the escape has dried up. The river, the drug of choice, the addictive behavior that used to serve as a means of escape is still down there and still attracts with the same magnetic lie, but it’s become more of a grave than a raging river. When the river is dried up, all that’s left for the one driving down to it is a river bed bottom of rocks.
Bruce’s lyrics give voice to how someone might tell his story from that place of rocks. It’s a ballad of reflection and self-seeking, and at the heart of it lies that question of what this something worse is that drives him and how can he possibly go on living now that his river is dry. It’s not a feel good song, but there’s an element of hope in it. He is singing. He has a voice with which to explore this trauma, and he has a starting point by acknowledging that his river, the river that has served as the chilly escape from life, can no longer serve him as it once did. And even though he ends on a lamenting note with “my baby and I” riding down to the river again, he’s telling this story to someone else. He addresses someone he calls “mister” twice in the song, which stylistically could be a two syllable filler, but on another level it tells us that Bruce’s narrator is having an honest moment in telling his story of struggle to someone who is listening. He’s beginning a new journey of connection that he couldn’t find in the river by giving a real account of who he is and where he is coming from. Telling that story and questioning the river are a start.
Link to listen to The River
Bibiolography
Inhaling the Blues: How Southern Black Musicians Transformed the Harmonica | At the Smithsonian| Smithsonian Magazine
