E Street Band opposites overcame a segregated genre
(NEWSER) - When America lost Clarence Clemons, it "lost an ideal." In the pairing of "Southern Baptist black" with "Jersey Shore white," Bruce Springsteen and Clemons gave life to "a cultural example of how the divides of race can come together over music," writes Timothy Egan in the New York Times . The two of them “projected a kind of joy that made it easy to believe that this mess of a country could get along." Rock once had many African-American stars—Fats Domino, Little Richard, Jimi Hendrix—but "whites basically stole the genre," observes Egan. More»
