The Ghost of James Baldwin
- Letters To You
- Jun 29
- 6 min read
June 29, 2025
As LGBTQ Pride Month 2025 begins drawing to its close, with the end of The "Land of Hope and Dreams" Tour following shortly thereafter, there's no better time for us to focus on James Baldwin, the great writer, orator, and civil-rights activist. Baldwin's life and work have had and continue to have an enduring impact on literature, the struggles of African-Americans, and the LGBTQ movement. Bruce Springsteen has been invoking Baldwin's name and work during every single show on The "Land of Hope and Dreams" Tour, before performing "My City of Ruins," when he says, "A majority of our elected representatives have failed to protect the American people from the abuses of an unfit president and a rogue government. They have no concern or idea for what it means to be deeply American. The America l’ve sung to you about for fifty years is real and, regardless of its faults, is a great country with a great people. So we’ll survive this moment. Now, I have hope, because I believe in the truth of what the great American writer James Baldwin said. He said in this world, there isn’t as much humanity as one would like, but there’s enough. Let’s pray..."
The Baldwin quotation that Bruce has been so regularly and movingly paraphrasing comes from the 1971 short-documentary film entitled Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris. The making of this half-hour film was marked by a crew of British documentarians engaging, sometimes contentiously, with Baldwin around the intersection of his art and his politics.
During one of the film's interview segments, Baldwin said, “There may not be, you know, as much humanity in the world as one would like to see, but there is some. There's more than one would think. In any case, if you break faith with what you know, that's a betrayal of many, many, many, many people. I may know six people, but that's enough. Love has never been a popular movement, and no one's ever wanted, really, to be free. The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of very few people. Otherwise, of course you can despair. Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, and look around you. What you've got to remember is what you're looking at is also you. Everyone you're looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that monster; you could be that cop. And you have to decide in yourself not to be.”
At another point in the same segment, the white Englishman interviewing Baldwin asserted that Baldwin was "writing for white people," to which he replied, "I'm writing for people, baby. You know, I don't believe in white people. I don't believe in Black people, either, for that matter. But I know the difference between being Black and white at this time. It means that I cannot fool myself about some things that I can fool myself about if I were white." In the 2021 Renegades: Born in the USA podcast/book project that Bruce Springsteen co-created with former U.S. President Barack Obama, Springsteen told Obama that he started reading James Baldwin's 1963 book The Fire Next Time in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. (The book's title, incidentally, is derived from one of its essays' quotation of lyrics from the traditional spiritual "O Mary Don't You Weep," also recorded by Springsteen on 2006's We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions: "God gave Noah the rainbow sign; no more water, but fire next time!") He then read to Obama a passage from the book that Springsteen said "always stuck with me:" "White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this - which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never - the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed."
Within Springsteen's circle, there probably has never been a bigger fan of James Baldwin's writing than Bruce's longtime biographer and friend Dave Marsh. (And speaking of President Obama and his tenure at the White House, during that period Marsh's email messages would often end with his signature accompanied by a 1961 quotation from James Baldwin - featured in 2010's The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings - that reads, "[W]hat really exercises my mind is not this hypothetical day on which some other Negro 'first' will become the first Negro President. What I am really curious about is just what kind of country he’ll be President of.")
In Marsh's excellent 2006 book Bruce Springsteen On Tour: 1968-2005, he turned to Baldwin's writing three separate times to help convey three important moments in Springsteen's live-performance career. First, when writing about the transformative breakthroughs that Springsteen and the E Street Band underwent in their performances on their 1975-76 Born to Run Tour, Marsh quoted from the same Baldwin essay "Letter From a Region in My Mind" that was collected in The Fire Next Time and from which Springsteen read a portion to President Obama. The portions of the essay that Marsh quoted, however, were two different ones that directly connected to music-making: "White Americans seem to feel that happy songs are happy and sad songs are sad, and that, God help us, is exactly the way most white Americans sing them," and "To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread."
"[B]ut Springsteen," wrote Marsh of the Born to Run Tour that launched fifty years ago this summer, "never sang white. Everything he chooses to sing, no matter who writes it, has the doubleness and contingency of which Baldwin speaks. You can't hear 'The E Street Shuffle,' or 'Mountain of Love,' or 'Thunder Road' or 'When You Walk in the Room,' and make neat divisions between happy and sad, or even strong and weak. What exists in Bruce's renditions of these is precisely sensual presence."
Second, when addressing how strongly Springsteen and his great 1992-93 touring band incorporated elements of Black gospel music into their shows, Marsh again cited a quotation from Baldwin's "Letter From a Region in My Mind" essay - this time one that was a bit longer - about the power of the music that he experienced in the Black churches of his youth: "There is no music like that music, no drama like the drama of the saints rejoicing, the sinners moaning, the tambourines racing, and all those voices coming together and crying holy unto the Lord. There is still, for me, no pathos quite like the pathos of those multicolored, worn, somehow triumphant and transfigured faces, speaking from the depths of a visible, tangible, continuing despair of the goodness of the Lord. I have never seen anything to equal the fire and excitement that sometimes, without warning, fill a church, causing the church, as Leadbelly and so many others have testified, to rock. Nothing that has happened to me since equals the power and the glory that I sometimes felt when, in the middle of a sermon, I knew that I was somehow, by some miracle, really carrying, as they said, 'the Word'—when the church and I were one. Their pain and their joy were mine, and mine were theirs—they surrendered their pain and joy to me, I surrendered mine to them—and their cries of 'Amen!' and 'Hallelujah!' and 'Yes, Lord' and 'Praise His name!' and 'Preach it, brother!' sustained and whipped on my solos until we all became equal, wringing wet, singing and dancing, in anguish and rejoicing, at the foot of the altar."
"The differences were many," wrote Marsh in comparing Springsteen's 1992-93 shows to what Baldwin was describing. "[T]here was ample warning, for one thing, the cries were different, the looks of wear meant something very different indeed. But in essence what sustained and whipped James Baldwin onward sustained and whipped Bruce Springsteen onward. To grow closer to that essence - to cause the church of his musical morality to rock - he went to its root."
And finally, and most appropriately prophetic, especially given the name of this very important and special current tour in which Bruce Springsteen continues incorporating the words of James Baldwin at each and every show, Marsh quoted one of Baldwin's greatest works of short fiction when writing about the greatness of Springsteen's song "Land of Hope and Dreams," first featured in the nightly setlist of the 1999-2000 Reunion Tour with the E Street Band, for which it was written:
"Rock and roll is the language of individualism, but it is also the language of the human bond, the story of each struggle and the realization that all those struggles are one. At moments like those, it is both sides of that equation at once. When the music gets to that place, we have come to the land of hope and dreams, where all of us - saint and sinner, whore and gambler, lost souls - come together. It is just as James Baldwin wrote in 'Sonny's Blues': 'For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it must always be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.'"
