To look at it another way, the bootleg of that 1996 show is entitled The Hitter in Syracuse, implying that Springsteen himself is the titular figure. As a man of forty-seven, he embarked on his very first solo tour, downshifting from arenas and stadiums to much smaller and more intimate venues, without his foil Clarence Clemons on the saxophone, without accompaniment from drums, bass, piano, or keyboards, demanding his audience not sing along, clap along, or talk during his set. The solitary singer was spotlit on stage, surrounded by a semi-circle of acoustic guitars and with a harmonica around his neck, reminiscent of a boxer in the ring, the type of pugilist preserved on celluloid in the opening credits of Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980), all smoke and slo-mo and B&W. Following the fame and success of the prior two decades, Springsteen found himself confronted by the questions of “Where does a rich man belong?” as he phrases it in his 2016 autobiography Born to Run, and “What is the work for us to do in our short time here?” The answers found him embracing his role as a man with something to say, and he said it via a most Carveresque iteration of minimalist realism, the straightforward story-song. Springsteen wrote of this period that “the precision of the storytelling in these types of songs is very important. The correct detail can speak volumes about who your character is, while the wrong one can shred the credibility of your story.” The fleshy middle parts of the American folk tradition would inspire Springsteen again, in an even more thorough excavation on the 2006 release We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions. A far sturdier and more consistent paean to the folk genre than Devils and Dust, We Shall Overcome is a barnstormer covers record, featuring interpretations of traditionals and early Americana, evocative of the best of the Coen Brothers’ music-in-history filmography (O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) and Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)) while blending in some John Saylesian populism and anticipating the folk rock revival that went mainstream with Mumford & Sons’ debut album Sigh No More in 2009 and which includes artists such as Dawes, Fleet Foxes, The Swell Season, and Iron & Wine.

By the time the listening public received the official release of “The Hitter” on Devils and Dust, almost a decade had passed since the Syracuse show and the song had remained a one-off, played that single time and never again. Hardly anyone at all had a cellular phone on that frigid autumn night in upstate New York and just about every adult in the country had one by the time Devils and Dust came out, though the smart phone revolution and its concomitant social networks hadn’t yet taken hold. It was a very specific time, liminal, a rut, the demi-depression of the second-term George W. Bush presidency as Bruce entered his more overtly political mode, stumping first for failed Democratic party presidential candidate John Kerry during the Vote for Change Tour (alongside R.E.M., Pearl Jam, John Fogerty, Death Cab for Cutie, Bright Eyes, The Dixie Chicks, Dave Matthews Band, and others) and then buddying up to the scion of hope that was the early-peaking entity known as Barack Obama. Whether or not the 44th POTUS will be viewed as a historical footnote, or the tip of the spear, or something else entirely is still to be determined. Is his legacy stained by mass incarceration, the exile of dissidents, an increase of the surveillance state, and an enfilade of deportations? Or will his reputation bloom, in retrospect, into a bastion of pre-Trump professionalism?

Whatever one thinks of executive branch expansionism and however one allocates political blame, “The Hitter” isn’t idealism gone sour and the song’s narrator is Springsteen’s most convincing black character. Stopping to consider, briefly, how few songwriters’ “characters” could be discussed straight-facedly and intellectually allows one to reckon with the respect that Springsteen earns for his best compositions. Just on the topic of the Vietnam War alone: Springsteen, in songs lasting only minutes, has been able to fully confront and evoke subjects that have taken up entire books by American authors like Ron Kovic, Michael Herr, and Tim O’Brien (not to mention a slate of Vietnamese and Vietnamese-American authors, including memoirist Le Ly Hayslip and Pulitzer Prize–winner Viet Thanh Nguyen).

One of the ingenious choices on Nebraska is the recurrent trope of the songs’ narrators deferentially or defensively inserting the word “sir” into their issuances of direct address. This is inverted in “The Hitter” where the address is epistolary, a man writing to his mother with the recurrence coming in repeated uses of the word “Ma.” This is a man risking exposure, letting down his defenses, writing to his progenitor. What boxers (and American males in general) are taught is: No matter what, never let your guard down. Be tough. Stay hard. Don’t open up, don’t expose yourself, emulate the father, sever yourself from the mother, because that would be weakness, that would be effeminate. On Nebraska, there is continual subjugation before “the man,” but here in “The Hitter,” discourse is not aimed at authority, and not with a tone of spiteful vitriol, nor of cowering defeatism, but softly inscribed in confidence to the speaker’s female parent. Many of Springsteen’s folk song characters are convicts, drawing parallels to Johnny Cash and the larger country music tradition. Others are just the working poor, folks who have been programmed to be deferential to their betters—keep your head down and “yes, sir” your way through the workweek so you can get to your weekend oases of beer and barbecues, or stickball and riding your bike if you were a certain kind of American Kid.[1] Specificity and exactitude regarding setting—these are two of Springsteen’s abiding strengths, as is his ability to write across race and gender lines. In Born to Run, he speaks of the songs from this period thusly: “I traced the stories out slowly and carefully. I thought hard about who these people were and the choices they were presented with…The old stories of race and exclusion continue to be played out. I tried to catch a small piece of this on the songs I wrote.”

In terms of his own parentage, Springsteen has written far more often about his father. Be it in “Factory,” “Independence Day,” “My Father’s House,” “Adam Raised a Cain,” or “The River,” Pop gets more stage time than Ma, who comes out in lesser-known nuggets like the sweet and gentle song of nostalgia “The Wish,” about how Bruce acquired his first guitar.[2]

Besides his recent theatrical endeavors, Springsteen is also a cinematic mainstay, and “The Hitter” is progenitor to Springsteen’s “The Wrestler,” which appeared in Darren Aronofksy’s 2008 film of the same name (and won the Golden Globe for Best Original Song), a minimalist pearl of its own featuring the battered visage of Mickey Rourke’s Randy “The Ram” Robinson as its central character. And while that song and film evoke heartbreak, aging, and both physical and mental destabilization, the decline and damage of “The Hitter” is even more bleakly profound. By presenting the world from the perspective of an African-American man who makes his living brawling, first as an up-and-coming professional and then, after throwing a fixed bout, as a street fighter for cash, Springsteen chronicles an unfortunately iconic American undermining and exploitation, and in nearly allegorical terms. The Hitter gets the glory but cannot hold onto it, as he quickly descends from shiny trunks and leather ring ropes to cold nighttime stockyards and chalk-drawn circles full of grisly blood sport. Capital “I” identity (particularly race, class, and ethnicity) has always been part of Springsteen’s universe. He is aware of his own immigrant lineage and is sonically a descendent of the soul music of Motown, Elvis Presley, and James Brown, with Bob Dylan his biggest lyrical influence, but in the identity-centric sense he is the literal opposite of Bob Dylan.[3] Listen to or watch an interview with each of these two great American songwriters or compare the prose styles and content choices of Born to Run and Dylan’s Chronicles: Vol. 1 (2004) and the contrast is stark. Shapeshifting is Dylan’s stock-in-trade, but identity for Springsteen is malleable mostly in how he projects his voice through point of view, where his panorama widens out and varies, from the early album Jersey shore denizens of songs like “Rosalita” and “Spirit in the Night,” to famed real-life mass murderer Charles Starkweather or the fictional Johnny 99 on Nebraska, to the conflicted and lovelorn border patrolman in “The Line” from The Ghost of Tom Joad, to the characters dealing with 9/11 in his 2002 release The Rising. And despite Springsteen’s lifelong friendship with Clarence Clemons, his love of black music and left-wing politics, you get the impression that Bruce wishes the number of African-Americans he can count as background singers or guys on the lighting or rig or concessionaires didn’t rival the number of total black faces in his arena- and stadium-sized crowds.

A Springsteen show is in many ways the most diverse place in the world, especially his gigs in Europe, but even with the cross-generationalism, the women and men, gay and straight, religious and atheist, people from all classes and eras and regions of America and the world, the one way in which his audience is most resolutely homogenous is that it remains largely white. Springsteen comments beautifully on the uneasy state of music diversity in his comments during a performance of the Harry Chapin song “Remember When the Music” on December 7th, 1987, released in 1990 as part of Harry Chapin: The Tribute Concert:

I guess there was a time when people felt that music provided you with a greater, oh, a greater sense of unity, a greater sense of shared vision and purpose than it does today. And my generation, we were the generation that was gonna change the world, somehow we were gonna make it a little less lonely, a little less hungry, a little more just place, but it seems that when, when that promise slipped through our hands we didn’t replace it with nothing but, but lost faith, and now we live in, uh, times are pretty shattered—I got my music, you’ve got yours, the guy on the street, he’s got his—and you could kind of sit back and say, not cynically but truthfully: Well, maybe, maybe all men are not brothers, and maybe we won’t ever know who or what we really are to each other.

That’s about as clear-eyed a reflection on the aspirations and failures of the baby boomers as one could offer, coming at the end of the eighties, during the second term of the Reagan administration, an America giving birth to the irony, angst, and pathos which would define the then-fledgling movements that would rise to dominance in the nineties: hip hop, grunge, and alternative rock.

“The Hitter” is thus birthed from a pretty dark and sardonic place, a more weathered Springsteen issuing a more withering glance, the flipside of Harry Chapin’s sunniness,[4] a mordant milieu better epitomized by the acerbic sarcasm and unrepentant abrasiveness of Warren Zevon, a Springsteen collaborator. But with “The Hitter,” Springsteen takes Zevon’s caustic tone and renders it more dolorous, legitimately sad, jaundiced without being dismissive, humane without making its lead character cheaply heroic or triumphant.

The nameless Hitter is prey to circumstances, but also a man who makes unwise decisions. The song around him imbibes from a fountain of multi-causal consequences and invokes both societal and personal responsibility. The speaker opens the song “just passin’ through and got caught in the rain,” asking his mother only for a place to lay his head for a moment: a respite, a rest stop, a sanctuary. He progresses towards reflection, an introspective tone comes in. This will be his life story, that of a young black man during the Depression era fleeing the police at an early age, heading from the rural south to New Orleans to sell his body. “Well they paid me their money, ma, to knock the men down,” with others reaping far larger benefits than he does, the classic working man’s plight. Comparisons to Rocky (1976) are inevitable, as are undeniable ripples of the “Battle Royal” segment of Ralph Ellison’s literary landmark Invisible Man (1952). “The Hitter” also presages another Springsteen effort about a black man who falls victim to institutional racism and naturalistic forces beyond his control, 2001’s “American Skin (41 shots),” the controversial song inspired by the death of twenty-three-year-old Guinean immigrant and New Yorker, Amadou Diallo, in a hail of bullets fired by members of Rudy Giuliani’s street crimes unit who said they mistook Diallo’s wallet for a handgun.

The speaker of “The Hitter” is a full-grown adult, world weary and without illusions, and, in his way, he too was cut down in his prime. He reminisces about his own glory days, when “the women and the money came fast and the days I lost track,” as he fought for “the men in their silk suits to lay down their bets,” defeating champion Jack Thompson before taking “the fix at the state armory with big John McDowell / from high in the rafters I watched myself fall,” opening up the paradigm of split identity, the things people do to survive in practicum that are nonetheless not who they really are. This is a human being as more than the sum of his actions, recalling Springsteen’s Academy Award–nominated “Dead Man Walkin’” from the 1995 Tim Robbins film of the same name. That song, along with 1993’s “Streets of Philadelphia” (Oscar-winner from Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia), Springsteen’s most well-known cinematic contribution, presents a pair of narratives portraying vulnerable and three-dimensional characters who are victims, but in a way that never plays the victim card or exonerates criminal acts, never reduces the issues of capital punishment or AIDS to oversimplified didacticism.

In “The Hitter” there are permutations of this approach as well. It’s not part of a film soundtrack but as a song it is cinematic, the penultimate verse depicting gray rain and the narrator’s tribulations in the present, fighting in work fields and alleys, an uber-capitalist social Darwinist survivor (like Christopher Walken’s character in The Deer Hunter (1978), if for only slightly lower stakes), too late to change, to become someone or something else, a fighter ‘til the end. He is just The Hitter; he is supplied no given name. He is one who pummels, who strikes, who typifies masculine aggression, be it biologically programmed or sociologically prescribed—“Understand in the end, ma, every man plays the game / If you know me one different, then speak out his name”—and thus as much a part of the encapsulation of the working and lower class male in America as any of Springsteen’s earlier, more famous, more epic and anthemic epiphanies on the subject, as well as a worthy heir to a folk pedigree that traces back to Woody Guthrie.

Springsteen has played the game better than most, and in his speech during the Chapin tribute he mentions the deceased troubadour’s philosophy on performing, “I play one night for me, one night for the other guy.” There is something genuinely altruistic about live music, even though the exorbitant middleman surcharges are straight profit-motive corporatism. Like a professional athlete, a musician plays for a live audience, for a gathering of souls in real time. You don’t get to watch the painter paint the painting, the author write the book, or the architect draw up the blueprints for the building. But live performance, the theatre, dance, music, and athletic competition (particularly one-on-one sports)—these can be life-affirming, even if their source material, subject matter, or larger milieus incorporate aspects of ugliness, downtrodden banality, and more failures than successes.

The subject of “The Hitter” is a despondent man, but also a resilient one. The tone of the song is hushed yet resplendent, crafted with a most subtle and nuanced patina, the low rumble of Springsteen’s vocal inflection offset by a mid-tempo acoustic strumming that illuminates the sheen of being alive even in the shadow of tragedy, as does the song’s undergirding of strings, keyboards, and muted horns, which create balance and parallel The Hitter’s rise and fall. Similarly, the closing sounds of the song—Springsteen’s wordless falsetto—etch out the inexorable progress of one who pushes forward, who refuses to succumb, who resists, an individual who “keeps a fire burning” (as Springsteen would intone during his cover of Suicide’s “Dream Baby Dream,” the stunning closer of most shows on the Devils & Dust Tour), someone who manages to retain a semblance of who they are even as they do what they have to do, someone who is not giving up, not just yet, who refuses to die, who elects, actively and autonomously, no matter how dire the environments and how repetitive the scenarios and how trapped the man may seem, to trudge ahead, a man who is broken but not beaten, who does not give up, who instead makes the choice to persevere, to pursue paths of flight, to seek solace, to continue on, to exist in this world. To live.