INTRODUCTION
For as long as I can remember, Bruce Springsteen has been a substantial part of my life. For many years, I only listened to his music, until in 2009 I started to explore a whole new range of artists, which led me to both musical and personal discoveries. At the time I was not much of a bootleg specialist, but following the breakthrough of all kinds of social media, I noticed that Bruce had also played a lot of covers, many more than I would have guessed. So, as a personal project, I started to investigate which songs Bruce had ever covered, in full and in snippets and listed these. I estimated this would take me about 6 months, but even today I’m still discovering…
I would like to thank the people who helped and supported me during this seemingly endless project. Dan, Patricia, Vini Lopez, Albee Tellone, Eddy from springsteenlyrics, Peter Rondelez for listing the Detroit Medley and Rosalita snippets, my Belgian tramp friends and my own Bobby Jean, Elio , …Elio, thanks again for introducing me to all these marvelous pieces of music and for the insights I gained while listening to them.
The purpose of this website is not to present to you all the statistics of a particular song. Instead, I want to provide you with the background, influences an origins of the songs, and simply hope that you will enjoy the music of Bruce’s heroes. Nonetheless, if you are interested in the statistics of the songs, I would recommend browsing
Brucebase, Springsteenlyrics and
E Street Shuffle where I got most of my information from. Thanks here too, because thanks to these websites I was able to complete mine.
I hope that, while going through this website, you will start to discover how Bruce’s songs are influenced by R&B, old rock and roll, doo-wop, by Van Morrison, CCR, Elvis, Dylan and many more. One of the many things I admire Bruce for is that he has never hidden his adoration for his own heroes. Always, whenever he could, he has shown his audience he was influenced by these great artists.
On the separate page containing the '
Keynote speech at the South By Southwest Music Festival' in March 2012, you can discover in Bruce’s own words what this music means to him and how it has affected his own songs. To some degree, this website is a big tribute to Bruce, but first and foremost this is a tribute to the artists who influenced him.
I always credited the artist who first recorded the cover song. Of course it is not always the first recording artist who influenced Bruce the most and I will surely credit the musician whom I think inspired Bruce the most to cover this particular song. Though I made three exceptions:
1. Elvis Presley
2. Pete Seeger
3. Woody Guthrie
I really wanted to give credits to them instead of the first recording artist because these are the artists who had a life-changing influence on Bruce. While discovering the website you will notice the information is not yet all completed. But this is a labor of love, … so I will continue day by day to complete it. Enjoy the search on this website and have as much pleasure in this 'sweet soul music' as I did.
On 11th of November 2022 Bruce released the album: "Only the strong survive". An album full of soulcovers. He couldn't have make me a better gift than this album. The Motown songs I love myself so much, are now officially released with the voice I like the most. And like Bruce once stated:
"I had to have some Motown because Motown was an incredible part of my youth. Also, if you wanted to know how to write, how to structure successful pop records, you could learn it all from Motown. The sound of the band, the importance of a great singer. Motown was the school where you wanted to go to learn your craft."
Linda
© All credits of course go to the original photographers.