Bruce Springsteen’s music can be the soundtrack of plenty of Oklahoma road trips. Songs about getting out of small towns, righting wrongs and morally gray areas seem to fit the landscape and the potholed roads. But does he write about Oklahoma?
You’d think he would, as the cultural successor to Bob Dylan — who was himself the cultural successor to Woody Guthrie as the voice of the commoner. And Springsteen is famous for creating a sense of geographic place in his songs, whether it’s the Utah desert, Atlantic City, New Jersey or deep in Fresno County, California.
On the occasion of a new four-album re-release of his iconic 1982 album “Nebraska” connected to the Oct. 24 release of the Jeremy Allen White Springsteen biopic “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere,” we took a deep dive into the Springsteen catalog to find every reference to Oklahoma. We looked at studio albums, B-sides and bootlegs.
And we were disappointed.
There are four references (four!) to Oklahoma or Oklahoma locales.
Songs on studio albums
“Black Cowboys” (“Devils and Dust,” 2005): There are two references in this song about a Black city kid named Rainey, whose mother is trying to raise him against overwhelming odds. The first reference sets a scene:
“Rainey’d do his work and put his books away / There was a channel showed a Western movie every day
Lynette brought him home books on the black cowboys of the Oklahoma range / The Seminole scouts that fought the tribes of the Great Plains”
The second reference is the final verse of the song, where Rainey leaves his hometown and gets on a train:
“He awoke and the towns gave way to muddy fields of green / Corn and cotton and an endless nothing in between
Over the rutted hills of Oklahoma the red sun slipped and was gone / The moon rose and stripped the earth to its bone”
“Western Stars” (“Western Stars,” 2019): Springsteen makes a single reference to a character the fading TV star at the center of the song is speaking with.
“Here in the canyons above Sunset, the desert don’t give up the fight / A coyote with someone’s Chihuahua in its teeth skitters ‘cross my veranda in the night
Some lost sheep from Oklahoma sips her Mojito down at the Whiskey Bar / Smiles and says she thinks she remembers me from that commercial with the credit card”
“Souls of the Departed” (“Lucky Town,” 1992): Springsteen uses Oklahoma as imagery for how one of the characters in the song — a mortuary officer in the first invasion of Iraq — sees casualties.
“On the road to Basra stood young Lieutenant Jimmy Bly / Detailed to go through the clothes of the soldiers who died
At night in dreams he sees their souls rise / Yeah like dark geese into the Oklahoma skies”
Bootlegs
“Cherokee Queen,” 1971: This is a legendary, if somewhat problematic, never-released song. If it weren’t for someone bootlegging a 1972 concert, we wouldn’t even know what it sounded like. After Springsteen hit it big with “Born to Run” in 1974, he sued his producer to get control of his music catalog. In the end, Springsteen had to pay the producer, Mike Appel, a buyout fee and Appel kept control of six songs. “Cherokee Queen” — with lyrics that feel insensitive 50-plus years after they were written — was one of them.
The first stanza:
“She’s a Cherokee queen / Yeah prettiest thing I have ever seen
She’s an Oklahoma lady / And she drives me crazy”
It does not improve from there. Trust us on this.
“Last Night in Tulsa” (various live performances, 1971): A traveling musician spends too much time on the road, finds himself in Tulsa and is going to miss the woman he met here. It’s everything you would expect a 22-year-old Springsteen to write. Tulsa’s probably in there because it fit the meter.
“Last night in Tulsa / And I’m going back home
It’s my last night in Tulsa / And I’m going back home
I been in town just one night too long”
The Semi-Qualified Others
The Boss has mentioned Oklahoma in covers of Pete Seeger’s “My Oklahoma Home,” and Woody Guthrie’s “Oklahoma Hills” and “Pretty Boy Floyd.” And he loves a good 1960s rock n’ roll medley. Oklahoma has appeared in his listing of Route 66 locations, including Oklahoma City in a cover of The King Cole Trio’s “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66.” And he co-wrote a song with Pittsburgh band Joe Grushecky and The Houserockers that has a drifter checking into a cheap hotel (“the Do Drop Inn”) in Lawton.
About our methodology: We discounted all the “I’m so happy to be here in (insert name of city)” references, like Springsteen coming on stage during his April 2016 show at the Chesapeake Energy Arena in Oklahoma City and saying “Oklahoma City! We’re so glad to be with you tonight! Are you ready to be entertained? Are you ready to be entertained? Are you ready to be transformed?”
We also excluded the less-generic-but-still-kind-of-schlocky local references, like this one from his 2023 appearance in Tulsa. He opened with “Good eeeeeevening Tulsa! Glad to be here! We’re living on Tulsa Time tonight” before going into “No Surrender.”
