Song Lyric of the Day (Bruce Springsteen, Paying Tribute to a Stock-Car Legend)

“James Dean in that mercury '49

Junior Johnson runnin' through the woods of Caroline.”— Rock 'n' roll \singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen, “Cadillac Ranch,” from his LP The River (1980)

I have just quoted from one song where Junior Johnson, who died this past week, is alluded to fleetingly but explicitly. But the NASCAR driver inspired another tune released several years before in which, though he is not specifically mentioned, the lyrics refer to his against-the-odds career: “I Got a Name,” written by Norman Gimbel and Charles Fox, which became a posthumous hit for Jim Croce.

“I Got a Name” is the theme for the 1974 movie The Last American Hero, based on a 1965 essay by Tom Wolfe. In its way, that piece went against the odds, too. Johnson had long been wary about speaking to reporters about how he got his start outrunning the law as a moonshiner in North Carolina.

But, as Michael Lewis recounted in this November 2015 profile of Wolfe for Vanity Fair, the novelist—at that point, still writing for editor Clay Felker—won Johnson’s confidence and came up with a pioneering example of The New Journalism. At one stroke, it cemented the legend of both its subject and author.

Photo of the Day: Campbell-Christie House, River Edge NJ

I took this image of Campbell-Christie House back in late January, on the grounds of Historic New Bridge Landing in River Edge, not far from where I live in Bergen County, NJ. Yet this four-room sandstone structure, dating back to April 1774, was originally located a bit more than a mile away, in New Milford. It was not moved to its current location, next to the more famous Steuben House, until 1977.

Jacob Campbell, a mason, built this home around the time of his marriage to Altche Westervelt. Three of their sons became privates in the Bergen Militia in the war that was to transform their neck of the woods in the next few years. The home passed through a couple of hands before being owned by the Christie family, who then occupied it for over a century.

The most famous of the Christies was J. Walter Christie, who was born in this house in 1865. He would achieve some degree of renown early in the 20^th century as an inventor, working on pioneer submarines as well as battleship turret tracks and gun mounts and the modern tank. More dangerously, he took up auto racing, including machines of his own making that briefly held speed records, in contests against the likes of Louis Chevrolet, Henry Ford and Barney Oldfield. That career lasted only three years, when he nearly died in a 1907 race in Pittsburgh, when he was doing 70 miles per hour. Luckily, he survived that accident and went on to pioneer front-wheel drive.