Seeing Bruce's We Shall Overcome on the Haiti telethon, what came to mind was something Jim Musselman had said at the fall's symposium.

As head of Appleseed Recordings, a tiny label with social justice goals, Musselman had prompted Springsteen's folk recordings in the 1990s, including We Shall Overcome. While many of the recordings eventually turned into the Seeger Sessions, the We Shall Overcome cut became a public-facing Sept. 11 song and, as I noted in the fall, a privately wild rights battle. But just as interesting to me was another controversy Musselman explained, about Springsteen's word choice in the song.

Years later, Musselman remembered the concern "darling" stirred. The chorus traditionally went, "Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe we shall overcome some day." Springsteen changed the first line to "Darling, here in my heart." The switch was small in print but huge in meaning.

One of the greatest collective songs of the 20th century had become personal. A civil rights touchstone had become applicable to individual cares and assumed greater and lesser social range. A song that lived in America might now live in your bedroom. Was such a shift decent?

If you don't believe in the power of word choice, you can ignore this blog post. Best I could tell in listening to Musselman, this debate and discussion ensued at the label levels, not in the public. A Google News search found nothing. So, if you don't care, you're in good company.

But I'm going to credit the word choice for the song appearing Friday night and, judging by my feeds, moving many people, myself included. I'm sure, since the line's shift, "Darling, here in my heart" has crossed minds for reasons lower than social change or rescue. Fair enough.

You can pre-order the Hope for Haiti Now telethon music on iTunes.

Heading to my 15th show tonight…

A few people have e-mailed to ask about what I presented, and I owe the doc to a few others from the symposium whose business cards are languishing on my (now much cleaner) kitchen counter. I thought for a long time this summer about writing a paper, real academic-like, but I succumbed to Powerpoint. "A bear in his natural habit, a Studebaker…"

Anyway, got some time to write down what I may or may not have said aloud. Here's the doc (scanned and virus-free). Notes in brief:

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Sunday, Lauren Onkey, education VP at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. "Bruce Springsteen in the 21st Century." Onkey examined his changing views on involvement, openness and — indicative of both — concert signs. Her critical question: "If he started this period trying to keep nostalgia at bay, is it now deep in it?" Reunion tour in '99 saw limited use of cover songs and early material, but they began emerging over the decade as more creative Springsteen projects got underway.

He then packaged engagement with history with new work (making the reunion tour actually the least interesting connection to the past, in Onkey's opinion). On the current tour, for the first time on a Bruce tour, new material isn't driving the set. Meanwhile, older songs are getting regular play, including covers fans are requesting with signs. Why choose the oldies from the signs, an audience member asked. I love oldies but have my questions here too. Easier to play? Nostalgia? Or a band victory lap? If a victory lap, Onkey called it "an interesting choice" to play songs, even old ones, they've never played before.

Highlights from her on the rock hall exhibit: Bruce still had the red hat from the Born in the USA cover photo. Also, when they exhibit opened, the curators had the BitUSA jeans facing forward. Visitors complained. The curators turned the jeans around. An unexpected underscoring: Springsteen sent along his motorcycle, hat and photo from an 1989 long ride with friends through the Southwest. (Likely the inspiration for Goin' Cali later released on the Tracks box set and now seemingly a break point in between the E Street break-up and the replacement band formation.) Onkey flashed some great loaned childhood photos but flipped through them quickly and asked the crowd not to take pix. After Springsteen loaned his writing notebooks, he then decided to send his writing table, chair and some utility bills from the table.

Onkey also mentions a passage from the rock hall's interview with Springsteen on the exhibit, with him answering about songwriting:

It's very relaxed. It depends — you just get an idea and sit down with a guitar, and it's a meditative state. Songwriting is fundamentally a meditation. It's the exercise of your craft, your intelligence. But it's primarily meditative, in that it works best when you go into a light trance-like situation. Where you just start to sort of… you're scraping the top of your subconscious, like with a knife, and the shavings, sometimes they turn into a song. And then occasionally the knife plummets deeply in, and it's not something you — it would be like having a shapeless piece of clay or something in front of you, and you start to run your fingers over it…

Sunday, Jim Musselman, head of Appleseed Recordings. "Springsteen's Trip into the Folk Playground." Starting in the mid-90s, "the strange, bizarre story of theSeeger Sessions involves: Bob Dylan rerecording a Seeger song for a compilation ("when did Bob Dylan ever care about vocals"), passing out during the rerecording, getting spooked by the negative vibes and essentially dropping out of the project, Bruce stepping in with We Shall Overcome, the song getting criticism over adding the word "darling," Tom Brokaw calling to use the song in the NBC Sept. 11 video, then-Song chief Tony Mottola sending heavies to Musselman's house to get the masters, Bruce and Landau backing Musselman against their company, Bruce revisiting the recordings eight years later because his kids liked them, ending the album with Froggie Went A-Courtin' because of the line "if you want any more, you can sing it again," Seeger disliking the album because he disliked all tributes…

… but loving Springsteen's American Land meshing a song Seeger had learned decades earlier from a Slovak immigrant — a sad one about a friend's family finally making it over just after his friend's death in the Pittsburgh mills — with the fun Big Rock Candy Mountain, and later The Wrestler repurposing a Seeger line. Musselman remains curious at the Seeger materials' strong response in Europe compared to the USA.

Symposium's closing session ran too long but had good stories from his "landlordess" during Born to Run time, Marilyn Rocky. My notes:

First Bruce calls, then Max calls, then Danny calls, each with less money to spend. She spells it "Springstein" on the lease. "Great tenant."

Early on, trades Bruce the plane seat next to his girlfriend in return for signed sick bags. Near that time, you can also hear her on a bootleg.

Much later, in the early '90s, she runs into Clarence at the dentist just as she's getting rid of the house. He asks if the piano is still there and tells her the whole band had signed the inside of the lid of the beat-up thing. She rushes to call outgoing tenant. Guy says it's the damnedest thing. Cleaning out the house the other day, they leave the piano and lots of other junk on the curb for pick-up. The next morning, the piano — and only the piano — is gone. "The piano is out there somewhere."

A little out of order, from two weekends ago…

Friday, neurologists talk about the brain and Springsteen. (Full post.)

Friday, Joe Grushecky playing acoustically and discussing songwriting (different from his Saturday night concert)… Setlist: Spanish Blood / I Remember It / Dance with Me / That's All I Want from You / Chain Smokin' / Homestead / Code of Silence / Talking with the King (partial) / Light of Day (partial) / Idiot's Delight (snippet) / … I have no note of a closing song, but that seems weird and maybe I forgot to write it down.

Highlight stories included: how he cut work to record with Springsteen, defying a Pittsburgh school system boss ("If you miss school again to work with Bruce Springsteen, we're gonna fire you"); debating a lyric "we still pray to the red, white and blue in Homestead" vs. "we still pray for" in these sessions; how a career as a special ed teacher working with emotionally disturbed kids has affected his songwriting; and how he and Bruce briefly thought of creating the "Beverly Hills Blues Band" with songs like Too Big Woman and Bad Secretary.

Friday, "Springsteen as Narrative Poet" breakout session. Scholar Steven Rogers delivered a great passage from an essay Steinbeck had penned about Woody Guthrie: "For some reason it has always been lightly thought that singing people are happy people. Nothing could be more untrue. … Working people sing of their hopes of of their troubles, but the rhythms have the beat of work — the long and short bawls of the sea shanties with tempos of capstan or sheets, the lifting rhythms, the swinging rhythms and slow, rolling songs of the Southwest built on the hoofbeats of a walking horse. The work is the song and the song is the people." Other presentations looked at the increasing cosmic references and range of community depictions in Springsteen's work.

Friday, after someone asked who was in a Bruce community online.

Friday, Vini "Mad Dog" Lopez signing CDs, with Tinker West (full post).

Saturday, "Springsteen and War" breakout session, I must admit I sat in by accident after misreading the schedule. But the highlight for me was a deep-dive into John Wayne's complex relationship with war and a discussion of where masculinity fits with war now vs. in the past.

Saturday, Eric Alterman, columnist for The Nation and author of the decent Bruce bio It Ain't No Sin to be Glad You're Alive… I think I'll remember where he spoke more than what he said, as he was a shadow in a room of shadows with a bright light behind him:

But from my notes: He compared himself to a disease — "a carrier of conflict." Tried personally to separate Bruce the artist from Bruce the person. "Just  because Bob Dylan doesn't unload the trucks at the food bank…." Believes his encouragement of Charlie Rose to ask about The Fever and The Promise led to their release on 18 Tracks (and I think he makes a decent case). My favorite line: "Every Dave Marsh book has one bad sentence about Bruce in it." While Alterman had come off as a bit abrasive in an earlier panel, he described that conversation later and was gracious toward it. Springsteen, "discontent with incipient political power," "mainstream conventional normal liberal political positions," "quite conventional liberal Democrat." Cites Streets of Philadelphia as underrated moment in Springsteen's political evolution. Was interested to see what Springsteen would say at Giants Stadium about GOP gubernatorial candidate Chris Christie being a huge fan.

Saturday, between sessions, cool magazine art I'd never seen before from the Friends of Bruce Springsteen Special Collection. Turns out to be a 1976 Playboy story new to me too. "The bell captain is somewhat skeptical. Does the person perhaps have a last name? No, Miami is his first name, Steve is his last name. Any clue to what he looks like? Well, he was last seen wearing a silk race-track shirt with palm trees on it. Ask your gardener if one of his plants is having lunch on the patio."

My favorite panel at the Glory Days Symposium came with connections to one author I've rarely read and one author I've never read. Both of them have always intrigued me, and the panel put them on my reading list (which, unfortunately, runs a long way). Below are notes I took…

On O'Connor, from Irwin Streight:

Character and incident present social truths. "Depth and compression" of characters. Sense of mystery and a sense of manners. Springsteen on Nebraska: "I wanted the music to feel like a waking dream and the record to move like poetry. I wanted the blood on it to feel destined and fateful." Impressed by the minute parts of her work. Follows her more on matters of form than thematic elements. Use of "some fun" and "meanness" moves from O'Connor's work to Springsteen as he read her. The Misfit. From Will Percy's interview with Springsteen:

She got to the heart of some part of meanness that she never spelled out, because if she spelled it out you wouldn't be getting it. It was always at the core of every one of her stories — the way that she'd left that hole there, that hole that's inside of everybody. There was some dark thing — a component of spirituality — that I sensed in her stories, and that set me off exploring characters of my own. She knew original sin — knew how to give it the flesh of a story. She had talent and she had ideas, and the one served the other.

On Percy, from June Sawyers (edited book I wrote about here):

"As lonely as is the craft of writing, it is the most social of vocations."

The main character of The Moviegoer, about to turn 30, is "a visitor in his own life." Says Sawyers, "Rather than living anywhere, he lives somewhere." What does it mean to question one's own worldview? Sawyers: "Springsteen was boss before he become boss." Common tension between reader and writer, something writers write about a lot, is the same as between listener and musician. In a 1997 profile in The NYT Magazine, Springsteen talks about watching The Searchers:

At the end of the film John Wayne has some realization as he reconstitutes the family that he can't join it. His inability to do that resonated with me. I spent 20 years playing on the road with no real home life or connections except when I played at night. Once I walked off the stage I didn't know how to do it., be part of it. Too much fear. I didn't have confidence that I could be accepted to the real world outside of my work.

A central Springsteen topic is how we live in the world vs. how we ought to live. Ordinariness offers redemptive hope of possibilities.

On Percy and Working on a Dream, from Michael Kobre:

Queen of the Supermarket criticized. What's beneath the gloss? In The Moviegoer, we find overwrought description, an unsettling sense of excess, and small beauties as steps in search of true beauty and the resolution of unexpressed sadness. The language within culture. "The roiling echoes of voices" as defining characteristic of Percy. "Isolates." Springsteen's work depends on how voices bounce off each other.

Percy writes about "the goodness and gravity of created being," with The Moviegoer eventually rejecting the voices and finding himself with faith. Similarly, Springsteen talks in late career about "poetry, mystery and terror" of Catholicism getting in his bones, leading to songs like Kingdom of Days, grasping the bigger world, beyond a supermarket.

(Your WOAD mileage, like mine, may vary.)

More from the symposium, about food banks much more than Bruce:

Saturday, "Springsteen and Social Consciousness" panel. The most interesting comments for me came from Kathleen DiChiarra, founder and still head of the Community Food Bank of New Jersey. She talked about the founding. Moved by famine relief programs and looking at act locally, "where my feet are planted," she gave her phone number to a group people called if they were going hungry. The earliest calls came from people afraid of others going hungry — people calling about neighbors or a butcher calling if an elderly woman was buying only three chicken wings a week and nothing else at his grocery.

In the latter case, DiChiarra timed a visit to the store, bumped into the woman as an excuse to talk and volunteered a ride home, starting a conversation on the way. It turned out the woman was using the three wings to make soup, her only food for the week. She'd used her life savings to pay for a new boiler in her house. DiChiarra grew this effort from the trunk of her station wagon to her kitchen to her garage to an unheated slaughterhouse to a string of warehouses, each larger than the last, many at some point having org-threatening disaster.

Her comment on performing charity versus addressing the systemic causes of hunger: Must do both. "Charity is on the path to justice."

On Springsteen's work, "he has helped a wide variety of groups, but he's never moved away from the issue of hunger." Her stories, some apparently told publicly for the first time, included: his volunteering in the early days in the slaughterhouse, the funny recognition moments (driver's backing an 18-wheeler into a loading dock, blocking multiple lanes of traffic, notices Bruce is the guy direct him behind the truck, stops in his tracks, jumps out of the truck and runs back to ask if it's Bruce), paying for a new roof after a structural collapse,  keeping them afloat after a failed building sale left them in the lurch, funding their Katrina relief efforts, and most recently paying for a "We can't let this bank fail" local media buy. Said DiChiarra, "Last year was one of the hardest years we'd ever had because we hadn't had this year yet."

On changes in support, she said she had seen the youth movement, especially interesting to her as she saw school field trips expanding from museums, etc, to volunteering. On using her growth opportunities to produce larger effects, DiChiarra cited expansion allowing them to hire more ex-offenders (80) and seeing recidivism less than 2%.

A good note to close, on how she keeps from becoming overwhelmed by the amount of hunger, "I have to keep recommitting. … I believe that there is a spiritual hunger that is as real as physical hunger."

A vicious Born in the USA on stand-up bass was the event's highlight (as, yes, I finally get back to posting from the now two-weeks-back Glory Days Symposium) from Jen Chapin and Stephan Crump. They're married. She gave birth days earlier. You can see them on two-year-old video performing the song, but imagine it twice as evolved/good.

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After soul Friday, Saturday's Glory Days symposium Pony show brought Willie Nile and Joe Grushecky to the stage, with special guest Danny Clinch, Mr. Springsteen's relatively official photographer and a badass harmonica player. My highlights: Nile's You Gotta Be a Buddha (in a Place like This), Grushecky's Swimming with the Sharks, Nile joining Grushecky for a loud and smoking All Along the Watchtower, Clinch for Folson Prison Blues, and of course Grushecky's main-set close, Down the Road Apiece.

One of the cooler parts for me was seeing Grushecky as his own man. Playing acoustic and having to talk all Bruce in a late Friday session, he struck me at points like Caden's double in Synecdoche, New York. But up there with the Houserockers, he was distinct and good night out.

A highlight that wasn't caught? Great friend/host Sheri spotting a little guy with big hair under a big Mad Hatter hat. As she said, "Sometimes I wish I could take pictures of people without them knowing." Me too.

Friday night: I got out of my car two blocks down the street and heard Jillian Rhys singing. I started walking faster. Halfway between Ronnie Specter and Christina Aguilera, super-pretty yes, she had an amazing voice and a tight band to match. This girl, a few guitars and a trumpet at the Stone Pony can do no wrong. Hear Jillian Rhys on MySpace.

Rhys' band at work. I don't remember the band having a name. And I don't think that's 'cause I was distracted. Pretty sure it had no name.

Later Friday: Gary U.S. Bonds, age 70, moving well while drinking wine on stage and still bringing the house down with Quarter to Three, now nearly 50 on its own. Great set included This Little Girl, Jole Blon (video to come), Out of Work, Dedication, Rendezvous, and newer stuff holding its own. Murder in the First Degree was a band-proving romp, and in a show with so much joking around, slow soul on All I Need (that audio doesn't do it justice) was the most underrated moment of the night.

In the crowd on Pony night one, we had a crowd of all ages (over 18). Yes, she was that good-looking. Yes, he was that old. Good for them.