Patriotism & Manliness in the Heart of Dixie: amorak huey on Ronald Reagan & Bruce Springsteen & Jason Isbell & the Polyphonic Pleasure of Cover Songs

It’s a sleepy sunny school-day afternoon in 1987 or ’88, and my twelfth-grade English class is in the library to listen to an editorial cartoonist talk about his work. Our teacher—a formidable, ageless fascist of a woman who told us which translation of the Bible would unlock the gates of heaven, who said the reason she would never do a Ph.D. is that the only text she would want to study so closely was the Bible and no college would let her tell the truth about the Gospel — prompted the guest to repeat something he’d told a class earlier in the day. He related how when he drew Ronald Reagan, he’d make Reagan’s chin and shoulders large to indicate toughness and decisiveness, as opposed to when he drew Jimmy Carter with a weak jaw and thin, unmanly shoulders. My teacher was utterly delighted by this fact.
This was the same small-town high school where later that spring, my government class would hold a mock vote for the Alabama presidential primary. Al Gore easily earned the nod on the blue side, capturing exactly both of the Democratic votes cast—by me and my friend Mark—while the other 28 people in the class divided themselves among George H.W. Bush and Pat Robertson and Bob Dole and whoever else was running for the GOP nomination.
This school, in this state, in this era—this is where I learned about manliness. About patriotism. I learned, for sure, what I was not and never would be. Was I even a real American? Now, Ronald Reagan with the jaw and the shoulders and the nation’s bully pulpit? Oh, yes. He was John Wayne and the Marlboro Man and Uncle Sam. Rugged and God-fearing and so very American.
So many of the men in authority around me looked like Reagan, with his perfectly creased face and Brylcreemed hair. Bear Bryant. Our landlord, a Mountain Brook good ol’ boy lawyer who liked to hunt and farm on the weekends. The pastor at the First Baptist Church where my friends went. Our mailman, who also went to that church and one time after I’d attended Sunday School with a friend and made the mistake of dutifully filling out the visitor card, came to our house with two other men to witness to us. My mother still talks about that night. When they got there, Reagan was giving a speech on TV, but while they were there the speech ended and some less wholesome show—The A-Team, perhaps—began, and she was embarrassed. But she was stronger than I was, and politely asked the men to leave after they told her she was going to hell for not bringing her kids to church.  
Reagan was not from Alabama, but in so many ways, in my mind, he was of Alabama. His values, his appearance, his rhetoric. I grew up knowing that if he was the pinnacle of white American manhood, I was destined to fall short, to forever be out of sync with expectations. Not strong enough, not tough enough, not Christian enough. We’d moved to Alabama from Michigan when I was young, but I never quite got past feeling like an outsider in Dixie — and maybe, probably, by extension, an outsider in Ronald Reagan’s America.
If Reagan was the pastors and landlords of my world, Bruce Springsteen was my Little League assistant coaches with the strong forearms and work boots and dirty white T-shirts, the truck-driving, Pabst- and Schlitz-drinking fathers and grandfathers who lived near me on Happy Hollow Road, a few miles outside of town. The Boss, a moniker that seemed more aspirational than accurate, because he wasn’t a suit-wearing office supervisor. Sure, he was a superstar, but the aura around him was blue-collar and denim. A heartthrob but a supposedly reluctant one, even with his denim-clad rear end and that red baseball cap in his back pocket on the cover of the Born in the U.S.A. album, silhouetted against the red and white stripes of Old Glory. I didn’t really seek out Springsteen’s music in the mid-’80s when he was at the absolute pinnacle of his popularity, but I also couldn’t escape it. He was everywhere. Larger than life, and like, Reagan, all jeans and bandana and stadium-filling manliness, surrounded by all-American iconography. In a book tracing the mythology of the American working-class hero, Bryan Garman writes: “Like Reagan and Rambo, the apparently working-class Springsteen was for many Americans a white hard-body hero whose masculinity confirmed the values of patriarchy and patriotism, the work ethic and rugged individualism, and who clearly demarcated the boundaries between men and women, black and white, heterosexual and homosexual.”
That link between Reagan and Springsteen is inescapable, entangled in the lore and legacy of both men. In 1984, Springsteen famously objected to the Reagan campaign’s playing of “Born in the U.S.A.” at rallies. Reagan persisted in coopting Springsteen’s image, however; Rolling Stone offers this bit from the president’s stump speech: “America's future rests in a thousand dreams inside our hearts. It rests in the message of hope in the songs of a man so many young Americans admire: New Jersey’s own Bruce Springsteen. And helping you make those dreams come true is what this job of mine is all about.”
Reagan was wrong about the song, to be sure. If you pay attention to the lyrics, it’s a protest song, a defiant middle finger to the powers that be, far more Woody Guthrie than Lee Greenwood. But it’s easy to understand the mistake. Who has time for lyrics? And the marketing of the song, of Springsteen himself, was pure white American macho myth. Listen to the music. It soars and rocks and rises, all overproduced synthesizer and bombastic reverb. The song feels like an anthem, a battle hymn, a praise song, and if there’s anything to remember about Reagan it’s that he was selling what it allegedly felt like to be an American way more than anything to do with what it actually was like for most of us. Springsteen himself pointed this out about the president who defined a decade, telling Kurt Loder in a 1984 Rolling Stone interview: “I think he presents a very mythic, very seductive image, and it’s an image that people want to believe in. I think there’s always been a nostalgia for a mythical America, for some period in the past when everything was just right. And I think the president is the embodiment of that for a lot of people.” But nostalgia blurs the truth, gauzes over the harms we inflict on each other, and Springsteen continues: “I think there’s a large group of people in this country whose dreams don’t mean that much to him, that just get indiscriminately swept aside.”
The people being ignored, left behind, by the white Christian patriarchal American dream — that’s who Springsteen wrote “Born in the U.S.A.” for, even if it wasn’t sold that way at the time, even if those people weren’t really listening. I have a distinct memory of reading this passage in Stephen King’s It, describing a teenage tough guy in a torn T-shirt, faded jeans, and engineer boots — the spitting image of a kid who bullied me in the lunchroom in ninth grade: “Like his two friends, he was dressed in unconscious imitation of Bruce Springsteen, although if asked he would probably call Springsteen a wimp.” That sentence made an impression on me, not that I could have told you why at the time. Some of that impact surely had to do with recognizing that bully (I remember him clenching a fist and faking a swing at me, and then when I flinched, saying to his buddy, “That’s what I like about this school, there are so many wimps,” and in this memory he is dressed exactly as King describes). Some of it — though again I could never have articulated this in 1987, when the book came out and I read it twice — was how well the sentence illustrated the performative nature of masculinity, the gaps between how we see ourselves and how the world sees us. There’s an analogy to “Born in the U.S.A.” here, surely — the gap between what Springsteen meant and what we heard.

* 

I don’t know exactly when I discovered Jason Isbell or how his music was introduced to me. I do vividly recall how I felt when I heard “Alabama Pines,” the first song of his I fell in love with:

You can’t drive through Talladega on a weekend in October
Just head up north to Jacksonville, cut around and over
Watch your speed in Boiling Springs
They ain’t got a thing to do
They’ll get you every time

He’s singing about where I’m from. I know those pines. I’ve driven that route. I’ve sat in NASCAR-weekend traffic on I-20 outside Talladega. I know the speed trap in Boiling Springs, or maybe I’m thinking of the one just like it in Moultrie, or the one on Highway 280 near Alex City. There’s such pleasure in that spark of recognition—in finding something of yourself in a piece of art you love. In hearing a song that immediately sends you to a particular moment in time, taking the back way home from Trussville, down Highway 11 past the Mini Mart and then winding your way up Happy Hollow Road, past Mt. Olive Church and the old mill collapsing into the Cahaba River. I said earlier that I’d always felt a bit like an outsider in the state my parents moved me to when I was four years old, but danged if this song didn’t immediately feel like home.
Isbell is from north Alabama, a town called Green Hill up near the Tennessee border, a town even smaller than Trussville. He’s about nine years younger than I am, but I imagine his experiences were similar to mine. I imagine that he’s someone who’s from a place, and of a place, and shaped by a place — but also not a perfect fit for that place. Shaped by the ways he doesn’t fit as much as by the ways he does fit. He was an English major at the University of Memphis, per his Wikipedia page, and when I learned this, I felt like, hey, yes, I was an English major, too! It all comes together! We’re practically pals!
Let me be clear: I don’t know Jason Isbell at all, and I don’t know anything about him other than the public stuff all of his fans and Twitter followers know. Still, I feel an unearned connection to him. (I sent his record label a signed copy of my poetry book Boom Box because I hoped it might find its way to him and he’d see a commonality between his art and mine.) I’m a fan; it’s what we do with the artists we love. That sense of connection is why we love them. It definitely feels better than being sold an image — that larger-than-life Bruce Springsteen from the 1980s, with the ginormous flag and the sold-out stadium shows. Bruce Springsteen is still a global superstar, obviously, but I like him and his music far better now than I did back then. He’s more outspoken, more openly liberal, far removed from the play-it-safe, Republicans-buy-albums-too rock star who told Kurt Loder in that 1984 Rolling Stone interview (one question after talking about how good his ass looked on the album cover) that he wasn’t especially interested in party politics, hadn’t voted in a dozen years, and didn’t necessarily see significant differences between Reagan and Mondale.
Part of the reason I like Springsteen better now is that he’s changed, much of it is that I’ve changed, and some of it is because of Jason Isbell.
Isbell and Amanda Shires’ 2014 version of “Born in the U.S.A.” is one of my favorite cover songs. And I fucking love cover songs. Ask the friends I talk about music with. I’m always going on about some cover or another; my fondness, say, for Dolly Parton’s version of “Stairway to Heaven” is a never-ending source of amusement for them.
     The Isbell-Shires “Born” appears on Dead Man’s Town, a collection of various artists paying tribute to the Born in the U.S.A. album by remaking it song by song on the occasion of its thirty-year anniversary. It’s the first song on the album, and in my opinion by far the best. And it changes everything about how I feel about the song. The opening notes of the original song are a jolt, an alarm, a clarion call. In this cover, the opening strains are mournful, desolate—a distant howl from the strings of Shires’ fiddle and the depths of American despair. The wistful ache of the lyrics is instantly present in the instrumentation.
The original version was what Kurt Loder labeled a “rousing rock & roll song” with an underlying critique of the American dream. This version is the other way around: it’s an elegy set to a dirge. The lyrics aren’t drowned out by the music here; the raw power of Springsteen’s story-telling ability emerges because of how carefully, how tenderly Isbell enunciates the words. That “first kick” the speaker takes leaves a bruise; we see the lonely fires lighting up those fields out by the refinery. Here, the music (Shires’ fiddle, Isbell’s softly strummed acoustic guitar) steps into the gaps to amplify or emphasize the message, and then gets out of the way of the narrative when it needs to: the listener is granted space to mourn that brother who died in Vietnam and to feel the devastating weight of the hiring man’s rejection. Springsteen has said that in his songs, the chorus is for the hope and hype, while the verses are where the blues lives. In this cover version, the chorus is quiet, muted, almost whispered at certain points, and the verses take center stage. This song sounds like how growing up in a small town in the 1980s on the wrong side of the Reaganomics scale felt. It’s beautiful and brilliant.
I’m not saying the cover is better than the original. It does not supersede or erase the original version, not that it ever could—rather, it contains the original. It responds to it. It enlarges it, resonating backwards to the Springsteen version so that now when I listen to either one, I also hear the other. As I’ve become more and more of a Springsteen fan over the years, I’ve learned to appreciate the degree to which his songs, like the best poems, reward close attention and revisiting. For years, my favorites were his quieter songs—“My Hometown,” for instance, or “Nebraska”—pieces where his yearning and his understanding of how bittersweet life can be were on full display. For “Born in the USA” in particular, it took the cover to unlock the original for me.
This is how art works, right? Not only cover songs—to be engaged by a piece of art is always to exist in more than one place at once: the world of the art, the world the art evokes or depicts, plus your own world in which this piece of art now exists. Listening to a cover song makes this polyphonic experience explicit. You’re hearing both songs at once. Now as I listen to Springsteen’s version, I hear the Isbell-Shires version. I hear that editorial cartoonist talking about Ronald Reagan. I am driving the back way home along Happy Hollow Road, amid the Alabama pines. I’m thinking about my father, who volunteered for Vietnam but didn’t go because of a heart murmur. I think about Springsteen’s own story about failing his physical when he was called for induction. Springsteen’s own father was a World War II veteran, a man’s man who didn’t like his son’s attitude or his haircut, who had been fond of telling his son that the Army would make a man of him—but when he found out Springsteen had failed the physical, he said, simply, “Good.” In my mind’s-eye version of that scene, the father looks a bit like Reagan.
Reagan never changed, though. Never had such a redemption moment. He was president of manly Christian white men, for manly Christian white men, and now, forty years after he was first elected and more than a decade and a half after he died, manly Christian white men still talk about him with reverence. Politicians still want to play Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” at campaign rallies. They still aren’t listening.
     I don’t live in Alabama these days, but four years ago, in 2017, when accused sexual predator and self-proclaimed Christian-values savior Roy Moore was running for Senate, I was paying close attention. In demeanor and even appearance, Moore reminded me so much of that mailman, that pastor—the men from my youth I felt judged by, the men who held themselves up as role models of virtue and patriotism. I knew that these men, if they were still alive, would be firmly on Moore’s side in this election, no matter how much of a hateful creep he so plainly was. It depresses me, the ways in which the world has moved on so little from 1984 or 1987 or pick your year when everything sucked and regular people were getting the short end of the stick from the people in power, when not being cis, white, Christian, male, straight meant you were on the outside looking in.
But, of course, things have changed. At first I was going to say something like “I don’t mean changed in a cheesy, things-are-getting-better way,” but I actually think I do believe that. The world is getting better. It’s not a linear progression, and it’s not everything. A lot of the world remains shitty. But I think some things are better. I think some of us are a little less likely to be fooled by a huckster with an American flag wrapped around him—okay, clearly not all of us, but, you know, at least Trump isn’t president anymore. At least some of us are little more free to be comfortable in our own skin. To be honest about who we are. To worry a little less about living up to some invented mythology about what it means to be American. As Amanda Gorman said in her inauguration poem, “Being American is more than a pride we inherit. It’s the past we step into and how we repair it.”
Some small portion of that repair work happens in our music. Jen Benka says that reading poetry helps us ask for a better world, and surely so, too, does our relationship with music. Bruce Springsteen sang “Land of Hope and Dreams” at Biden’s inauguration (some have speculated that Reagan’s appropriation of his work made Springsteen as politically outspoken as he is these days). Jason Isbell openly addresses whiteness and toxic masculinity in his songs, pissing off his conservative fans and making the rest of us adore him all the more. The very week I’m finishing this essay, Isbell released an album of cover songs—Georgia Blue—in honor of Georgia’s vote for Biden in the 2020 presidential election. If there’s hope for Georgia, if it’s possible to overcome gerrymandering and voter suppression and the weight of history, there’s hope for Alabama, too, right? Right?
Each song on this new album has Georgia roots, from “Midnight Train to Georgia” to “Kid Fears” to “Driver 8,” and these covers do honor to the original versions. They are not replacements or revisions, not correctives or clarifications. They are joining the conversation, like the cover song that inspired this essay. If you start to Google “Born in the U.S.A.” among the first autofill suggestions is “Is ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ a patriotic song?” The answer is yes. It is exactly patriotic to be able to look at your country honestly. To criticize its shortcomings. To point out who’s not being given access to the dream. Ronald Reagan, not even the lantern-jawed cartoon version of him revered by people like my English teacher, doesn’t get to decide what patriotism is. He doesn’t get to decide who matters or what unlocks the gates of heaven. The song is not for Reagan, nor for any politician. Not the original version, not the cover. It’s for the rest of us. The people struggling to find our place in a world where we don’t always fit the mythology. The people who just want to live and love and be loved and thrive, no matter the time or town or nation of our birth.

Amorak Huey’s fourth book of poems is Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy (Sundress Publications, 2021). Co-author with W. Todd Kaneko of the textbook Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2018) and the chapbook Slash/Slash (Diode, 2021), Huey teaches writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan.