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A Thanksgiving Week Rate-A-Record

A side of musical gratitude to go with your turkey

Paul Combs
3 min readNov 20, 2022
Photo by krakenimages on Unsplash

It’s Thanksgiving week here in the United States, where we celebrate a holiday while getting the entire history of it completely wrong. Our Canadian friends beat us to it by a month, while our British cousins ignore the holiday as deftly as they ignore us. But I digress.

For this week’s installment of the ever-popular Rate-A-Record, I thought it appropriate to stick with the theme of thanks/gratitude. It was not as easy a decision as it might seem; try as I might, I could not find a single Springsteen song that fit squarely into the thanks/gratitude category. I could have stretched the topic to the breaking point by making the case that tramps like us are thankful we were Born to Run, but that would have elicited groans from Simon Dillon even as he marked his bingo card.

Ironically (no pun intended, given one of the artists below), all three of the songs here are by female singers. Does this mean that men are inherently less grateful? Ask that one around the dinner table on Thursday; it will be a nice diversion from Crazy Uncle Bob’s glee that a certain former president is now back on Twitter.

“Kind and Generous “— Natalie Merchant

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Paul Combs
Paul Combs

Written by Paul Combs

Writer, bookseller, would-be roadie for the E Street Band. My ultimate goal is to make books as popular in Texas as high school football...it may take a while.

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