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Yesterday I blogged about a video "Scraping By: Portraits of Life during the Great Recession," by filmmaker Stewart Thorndike, which documents a tent city for the homeless and unemployed on the grounds of St Jude's Catholic Church in Redmond, Wash.
"Shades of Tom Joad," commented frequent visitor to this site, Frère charles du désert OSB OBLAT (Congrégation de Subiaco) (not verified). The phrase "shades of Tom Joad" seemed familiar to me, so I googled it and was rewarded with a YouTube video of Bruce Springsteen singing: "The Ghost Of Tom Joad." (I can link to it, but unfortuantely permission to embedded it to other sites is restrecited.)
On that YouTube page is a comment by MrCopperhead1861 that is worth reading: "This was just played on a TV special for Pete Seger, granted, I'm not a fan, but when Bruce sang it, [it] was from his soul. It's scary to think this was written when I was a kindergartner and it seems more relevant now than then as our country moves toward the unknown."
YouTube also offers a live concert video of Rage Against the Machine performing "The Ghost of Tom Joad" in 1997.
The best offering, however, has to be this version: Springsteen and Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine perform "The Ghost of Tom Joad" in 2008.