The Big Apple Songs: Darlington County

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The heat has broken!!! The weather app says it’s currently 76F/24C, which is a huge break from the 100F/37C we hit Friday. This is the “unofficial end of summer” with the Labor Day weekend, and the weather is cooperating here for people who want to be out. The songs about New York City are still smokin’ hot, though! Here we go with today’s song. Darlington County - Bruce Springsteen While the math is a little off (it’s only 630 miles from New York City to Darlington, SC, not the “800 miles” mentioned in the song, but I imaging traffic jams in and around New York can fill in the other 170 miles ), it’s still a great tune for a road trip. Lots of Bruce Springsteen’s songs make for good road tripping playlists. This is the tale of two guys who head south, presumably down Interstate 95, looking for (mis)adventure. They are seemingly looking for work (“got a union connection with an uncle of Wayne’s”), but they end up with more trouble than they bargained for. While the narrator gets away, while “driving out of Darlington County” he sees his buddy “Wayne handcuffed to the bumper of a state trooper’s Ford.” I mentioned this song in a discussion I wrote some time ago about the legendary Dixie Highway, which is mentioned in this song (“We’ll leave this Darlington County for a ride down that Dixie Highway”). While it didn’t go that far east in South Carolina (it went through Greenville down to Savannah, Georgia), I think it’s super cool that a guy from New Jersey paid homage to one of the earliest national road routes in America. The song that follows this song on Born in the USA, and the song usually paired with it in Springsteen’s concerts, is “Working on the Highway,” which seems to be what happened to Wayne after he got arrested (“me and the warden go a-swingin’ on a Charlotte County road gang”), although it’s set in North Carolina (mentioning the town of Stovall), not South Carolina. Hey, if Johnny Cash can end up in a California prison for shooting a guy in Nevada, who are we to argue? Turn it up and rock out with the Boss! Darlington County Written by Bruce Springsteen Recorded by Bruce Springsteen From Born in the USA, 1984 NYC LYRICS: We drove down from New York City where the girls are pretty but they just wanna know your name