Johnny 99

“Johnny 99.” During Ronald Regan’s campaign speech in New Jersey, he declared, “‘America’s future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts. It rests in the message of hope in songs of a man so many young Americans admire: New Jersey’s Bruce Springsteen. And helping you make those dreams come true is what this job of mine is all about’”(Gilmore 273). Reagan’s laughable attempt to co-opt the popularity of local hero, Bruce Springsteen, was probably the brainchild of one of his political advisors, someone who had only paid attention to the rousing chorus of “Born in the U.S.A.,” oblivious to the protagonist unemployment or the despair in the line, “Nowhere to run, ain’t got nowhere to go/ Born in the U.S.A.” It would be difficult to imagine a more unlikely association than conservative Reaganomics—supply-side economics, resulting in lower taxes for the rich, and increased defense spending—and Springsteen’s career-long message that things are far from all right in the land of plenty. Springsteen’s response to Reagan’s statement was not immediate, and to his more liberal fans, not as dramatic as they might have hoped for. According to Marsh, in concert, fittingly using the stage for his rebuttal, he told the crowd, “The President was mentioning my name the other day, and I kinda got to wondering what his favorite album musta been. I don’t think it was the Nebraska album. I don’t think he’s been listening to this one.” And he played a scorching ‘Johnny 99’”(486-487).
Instead of the “Nebraska” harmonica intro, Springsteen begins the song with a quiet wail that has the sound of impotent resignation and sorrow; and it’s influence can be traced to Woody Guthrie and the hurt song, a genre that Bryan Garman summarizes as songs that “express the collective pain, suffering, and injustice working people have historically suffered, and articulate their hopes and dreams for a less oppressive future” (222). “Johnny 99” also shares a similarity in theme and tone to lowdown blues prison songs—such as Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Prison Cell Blues,” found on the Anthology of American Folk Music, or Blind Willie McTell’s “Death Cell Blues.” The opening wail or moan mimics the lyrical phrasing of Blind Lemon and Blind Willie, and the sense of resignation of “Johnny 99,” in the line, “Well your honor I do believe I’d be better off dead,” echoes the Blind Willie’s “Ain’t but one thing could release me/ and that’s ole Father Time.”
“Johnny 99,” like “Nebraska” and “Death Cell Blues,” is another prison monologue, and it is yet another story of a man pushed to the edge by circumstances beyond his control. It is the story of Ralph who earns the nickname Johnny 99 after he is convicted for the killing of a night clerk. In “Nebraska,” the only justification Starkweather gives for killing “ten innocent people” is that “there’s just a meanness in this world”; “Johnny 99,” however, provides enough background information that suggest a possible cause and effect for Ralph’s crime. In the first stanza we are told that he loses his job because the auto plant closes; because he can not get a job he gets drunk, finds himself in that void where anything can happen, and shoots the night clerk. It is up to the listener, not to justify the crime, because even Ralph says he is not innocent, but to realize the implications of Ralph’s statement to the judge, “But it was more ‘n all this that put that gun in my hand.” Mikal Gilmore quotes Springsteen as he discusses Nebraska and the plight of the worker in America during the 1980s,“And if people are sick and hurting and lost, I guess it falls on everybody to address those problems in some fashion. Because injustice, and the price of that injustice, falls on everyone’s heads. The economic injustice falls on everybody’s head and steals everyone’s freedom” (271). Unlike the poets in the song “Jungleland” who “try to make an honest stand/ But they wind up wounded,” Ralph/ Johnny 99, like the narrator of “Atlantic City,” who has been “lookin’ for a job but it’s hard to find,” does not live in a world that affords people the opportunity to “make an honest stand.”