How Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born to Run’ Gave Voice to the Working Class

When Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run hit the radio airwaves in the summer of 1975, it wasn’t just a breakout album—it was a roaring, full-throttle tribute to working-class life, capturing the frustration, hope and restless energy of Americans chasing something better down the highway.

Released in the shadow of Vietnam, Watergate and a sputtering economy, Born to Run landed as America’s postwar optimism was cracking. Factory towns were fading, blue-collar families were squeezed and the American Dream felt increasingly out of reach. Springsteen, just shy of 26 years old when it was released, channeled his own working-class coming-of-age experiences in Freehold, New Jersey, into a deeply personal album that reflected his hopes and dreams. It was, he told Rolling Stone, a project he wanted to feel “full of possibilities [and] full of fear.” 

After two initial albums that were critically praised but anemic in sales, “Born To Run is his turning point,” says Jim Cullen, author of Born in the U.S.A.: Bruce Springsteen in American Life. “He’s realizing his class and circumstances have created difficulties for his parents and the people he grew up with. He wants to seriously grapple with that.” 

The album wasn’t just an artistic and commercial breakthrough—it was the turning point when Springsteen evolved from a scrappy bar-band poet into a national voice, securing his place in the American rock ’n’ roll canon.

By the mid-1970s, America was still reeling from the aftershocks of a deep recession. Inflation and unemployment remained high. The energy crisis sent gas lines stretching around the block. Steady factory jobs that had once powered upward mobility in America were disappearing, causing many proud working-class neighborhoods to fall into decay. As that foundation of postwar prosperity gave way, a deeper sense of disillusionment took hold—fueled by the trauma of Vietnam and the lasting mistrust left in the wake of Watergate.

Little of the era’s pop music spoke to that reality. Glam rock, disco, soft pop and arena metal, mostly escapist and often emotionally detached, ruled the airwaves. But Springsteen, with Born to Run, pulled hard in the opposite direction. Channeling his cultural heroes—the dusty defiance of folk legend Woody Guthrie, the lyrical fire of folk-rock icon Bob Dylan and the aching realism of author John Steinbeck—Springsteen wrote with empathy about characters trying to move past dead-end towns, broken homes and invisible ceilings. 

It wasn’t fiction for him. “I grew up in this dumpy, two-story, two-family house, next door to this gas station,” Springsteen recalled to rock ‘n’ roll critic and music historian Dave Marsh in the book Bruce Springsteen, Two Hearts: The Definitive Biography, 1972-2003. “And my father, he worked a lotta different places, worked in a rug mill for a while, drove a cab for a while and he was a guard down at the jail for a while.”

His father, often angry and drained, would turn off the lights at night and sit in the kitchen with a six-pack, Springsteen related, while his mother—who worked steadily as a legal secretary—watched TV until she fell asleep. He and his sister often felt literally trapped in the dark.

That upbringing shaped Springsteen’s worldview and saturated his Born to Run songwriting. He wanted “his childhood experiences to inform and animate his art,” says David Masciotra, author of Working on a Dream: The Progressive Political Vision of Bruce Springsteen. 

With his first two albums, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. and The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, both released in 1973, Springsteen chronicled teen life on the beaches and boardwalks of the New Jersey shore. “He has relatively little, wants relatively little and the people he’s writing about aren’t questioning their circumstances,” says Cullen. 

In Born To Run, Springsteen begins addressing more serious themes, giving his songs more grit, urgency and drama, writes Library of Congress cultural historian Cary O’Dell. The characters, facing adult realities, dead-end jobs and the prospect that their youthful dreams might evaporate, look frantically for an escape hatch. 

Musically, he underscores that dual expression of despair and hope. “He widens his sonic landscape with the album,” says Masciotra. “Springsteen once said he aspired to write songs with blues verses and gospel choruses. In many of his best songs, some lines are quite grim. But then with a key change and a lyrical lift, the picture suddenly becomes brighter.”

Fifty years after its release, the album’s eponymous title track, “Born To Run,” stands as a defining moment in Bruce Springsteen’s career—the song that proved he could fuse cinematic storytelling with heart-pounding, anthemic music. It’s a song of motion and urgency, where the road out becomes a lifeline.

As its title suggests, “Born To Run” is about breaking free—from dead-end towns, from family dysfunction, from the quiet suffocation of working-class life. The narrator pleads with his girl, Wendy, to come with him.

The lyrics channel both existential despair (“Baby this town rips the bones from your back/It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap”) and a defiant vision of working-class identity. When Springsteen sings, “Tramps like us, baby we were born to run,” he aligns himself with the marginalized—not in pity, but in solidarity. It’s not poverty he romanticizes, but the will to escape: a declaration that even if the world gives you little, you still have your dreams, your wheels and someone to ride shotgun.

“‘Born To Run’ is about breaking free and rising above the circumstances and struggles that hold you down,” says Masciotra. “Springsteen at his best balances the rage and sadness with hope, redemption and a faith in transcendence.”

Other songs on the album also chronicle young people trying to find their way out. In the album's first track, “Thunder Road,” a young, up-and-coming musician tries to cajole his girl, Mary, to escape with him: “Climb in back, heaven's waiting down on the tracks... It's a town full of losers/and I'm pulling out of here to win.”

Another song, “Night,” tells the story of a worker who gets “up every morning at the sound of the bell,” only to arrive at work late and catch hell from the “boss man.” The reason he’s late? He spent all night drag racing. Springsteen’s lyrics channel the romance of the dangerous diversion: “You’re in love with all the wonder it brings/and every muscle in your body sings as the highway ignites.” In a life going nowhere, he suggests, street racing offers a visceral sense of power, excitement—and forward momentum: “You're just a prisoner of your dreams/holding on for your life/'Cause you work all day/To blow 'em away in the night.”

In “Jungleland,” two young lovers turn to a life of crime so they can live in “a society that places emphasis on material gain,” says Masciotra. (Hint: It doesn’t end well.) The track “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” tells the “story of the band getting together and me getting that going,” Springsteen told radio host Howard Stern—a story, ultimately, of how music can be a lifeline out of society's lower rungs.

Ultimately, Born To Run became Springsteen's own golden ticket, one that has left a massive legacy. “It is Springsteen’s best record. It is his most quintessential record," says Masciotra. "It has such a big heart, and there’s such a humanistic sense of hope with the characters—even when their stories end badly.”

After being released on August 25, 1975, Born To Run garnered rave reviews. Rolling Stone’s reviewer called it “a magnificent album that pays off on every bet ever placed on” Springsteen. The New York Times reported that Springsteen and Born To Run had “inspired virtually all of the nation's rock music critics to unloose some of their most resounding huzzahs in recent memory.”

Born To Run reached number three on the U.S. Billboard 200 chart, easily outselling Springsteen’s earlier albums. “The sense that this record was different from the others, his live performances, the critical consensus building around him from the critics and DJs, all made Born To Run a breakout record,” says Cullen. 

And the themes Born to Run addressed—struggle, dignity, escape and the cost of staying put—have echoed through Springsteen’s work ever since. From the stark ballads of Nebraska to the haunted reflections of The Ghost of Tom Joad and beyond, he has continued to chronicle the lives of working people with empathy and urgency.

Springsteen’s exploration of the working class will always carry a particular irony, says Masciotra—since the singer has repeatedly admitted that he’s “never had a real job in his life.”