In 1995, Bruce Springsteen contacted me and photographer Michael Williamson about our first book, Journey to Nowhere, the Saga of the New Underclass. (We showed the destruction of a steel city, traveled with the new jobless and became hobos with them during the start of the hard times in the early 1980s.) Bruce was inspired to write two songs from that book on his Ghost of Tom Joad release — "Youngstown" and "The New Timer."

We've now spent 30 years documenting the economic ruin faced by millions. This has resulted in our latest book, Someplace Like America: Tales from the New Great Depression, published by the University of California Press. Bruce has written a foreword to this book.

Meantime, in the coming months here on the Backstreets website, I'm going to show you how we did this story. Between 1980 and 2010, we traveled over a half million miles around the country, riding on freight trains, in buses, or by automobile, meeting hundreds of people. We saved everything. I'll tell the back story visually in audio slideshows and pictures with text (with occasional video) from our archives of photos, notes, ephemera — the kind of stuff you don’t usually see from a writer or photographer until after they are long dead. There will be footage of our jumping on a freight train in 1986. I'm not quite sure anything quite like this visual history blog has been done before. I'll take you along behind the scenes, up to the day Bruce contacted us. Later, I'll share things from after — how Bruce got us back on the story of American workers.

This will be the raw anatomy of not only the making of our books, but what has happened to America over the past 30 years. I will not hold back. I'll show how we did what we did, warts and all. At times, it may be like visiting a sausage factory — it was a long and hard road that Michael and I traveled. But mostly, I hope this blog and our book reveals something hopeful about us as a people. We are at a critical juncture in our history as a nation. By telling the stories of workers — including the real-life people Bruce sang about in those two songs from our first book — we can begin raising the questions that we have to answer to find a way forward into creating a new and better America. That is the goal of our new book.

I suggest that you read from the bottom up in order to follow the story. You might want to play Bruce's music while looking at the posts. An obvious choice is Ghost. But so much fits — material from The River and Nebraska albums, for sure. A favorite individual song is "Seeds."

If you want to keep up on developments on the book (and both a feature film and documentary based on it) or to post comments, please click here to link to my Facebook page. I will try to answer your questions as time permits. I will be posting exclusively to Backstreets.com, but I will put this material on that Facebook page a few days later after each post, as well as the UC Press website.
--Dale Maharidge

Purchase Someplace Like America:
Tales From the New Great Depression
Hardcover - Softcover