Karine Polwart
His songs are stories, strong narratives with strong characters. They’re about the disaffected, the marginalised, the invisible people, the people who don’t count. And in that respect, they have a lot in common with what would constitute Scottish or English or Irish folk music. The Ghost Of Tom Joad is one of the songs I’m going to be singing, which harks back to The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. it’s about the disaffected people of
America. He’s explicitly making a connection between contemporary America and the 1930s, the Great Depression era. His writing is super-politicised. It’s hard not to read a lot of his writing in the last decade as being about what capitalism has done to America.
My favourite is Streets Of Philadelphia, a song about someone who has no value, no worth, who is clinging on to hope. That song, written during the peak of the AIDS crisis, was a very bold thing for a writer at the top of his game to do at that time – to humanise the experience. The songs which are more fragile and vulnerable are the ones I think are more beautiful.”
The Rails will be performing Springsteen classic Racing In The Street from his 1978 album Darkness on the Edge of Town. This is how it starts...
I got a sixty-nine Chevy with a 396
Fuelie heads and a Hurst on the floor
She’s waiting tonight down in the parking lot Outside the Seven-eleven store
Me and my partner Sonny built her straight out of scratch And he rides with me from town to town
We only run for the money, got no strings attached We shut ‘em up and than we shut ‘em down
Tonight, tonight the strip’s just right I wanna blow ‘em off in my first heat Summer’s here and the time is right For racin’ in the street