Oh Mary Don't You Weep

Tribute and cover albums are tricky, usually an artist that gets such a treatment are already legend so it’s a heavy burden to try to live up to such greatness. And when it comes down to it, who want to hear flash in the pan groups try to recreate Jimi Hendrix songs when you can just go out and get The Ultimate Experience for the same price. Even with establish artists such as Rod Stewart or the recent collaboration between Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs (see my review - Who Knows Where the Time Goes), I would much rather spend my money on the originals. But on occasions, such tributes work like two years ago when Eric Clapton released a whole album of Robert Johnson tunes. Now you can Bruce Springsteen to that short list.

We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions is full of songs that were written or at one time recorded by the album’s namesake Pete, and for those who initially though Bob, please smack yourself upside your head for me (Plus his last name is spelled Seger). To recreate the classic American folk music, Springsteen recruited about fifteen musicians and vocalist whom then brought along instruments from tubas to banjos to accordions to washboards and of course Springsteen provide the harmonica himself. All of them packed themselves into Springsteen’s New Jersey home over three days.

Springsteen is no stranger to folk music himself releasing acoustic classics like Nebraska and The Ghost of Tom Joad, but where those albums are somber affairs about the darker sides of the American tradition, The Seeger Sessions play more like a party that still resonates in twenty-first century America, whether that be in the north or south, red or blue. Pay Me My Money down can get anyone up and dancing and opener Old Dan Tucker, where Springsteen growls like Tom Waite, is so dirty it’s good.

That doesn’t mean the guy behind the Vote for Change Tour shy away from Seeger’s political side. On Mrs. McGrath, the line, “All the foreign wars, I do proclaim live on blood and mother’s pain” is more poignant today than when Pete Seeger sang it or when it was written in the nineteenth century in Ireland. Then there is the title track, which also became the theme song during the civil rights era and Eyes on the Prize, another protest anthem, that’s name which has also become rooted in civil right.

Also include here are children songs that I probably haven’t heard since before I started school like Erie Canal and John Henry. If there is a problem I could find here is that just over an hour, it may be a little too long. He maybe should have kept three or four songs off and saved them for what I hope will be a second volume to the Seeger Sessions.

Song to Download - Pay Me My Money Down

We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions gets a on my Terror Alert Scale.