I am a somewhat avid listener of Bruce Springsteen, and quite good with google, but for the life of me I cant figure out who Mary is in many Springsteen songs. I have heard him say its a girlfriend, mary (of Jesus fame) etc, but I gotta believe someone out there knows.
Several songs spanning his career:
Mary Queen of Arkansas
Marys Place
Thunder Road
The River
etc
All have ‘Mary’ references in various contexts.
WHO IS MARY?
I think it is just a particularly unimaginative generic girl’s name, like Wendy or Sandy or Sherry. It’s easy to rhyme and has two syllables.
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Mary? She hangs out in Cafe Society. She was Born in the USA and if I move this thread over there, it’ll be On Fire.
I’ll stop now before I get Blinded By The Light…
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She’s in “The Rising”, too.
Generic working class american woman. I don’t think there’s a specific person in mind.
In Thunder Road her name changes from Mary at the beginning of the song to Wendy at the end, which I think supports Jonathan Chance’s stance that it just a good generic name.
In the river, he sings “Then I got Mary pregnant and man, that was all she wrote…” The name is the prototypical Catholic girl’s name of a certain age, and it rhymes well. Catholic girl + pregnant = marriage, whereas maybe not so much for a Wendy, Sandy or Sherry. Time have changed, of course, since Bruce was a teen, but that fits well with for the times.
Mary stays Mary throughout Thunder Road. Wendy shows up in Born to Run.
Let’s see, then Terry is his male friend in Backstreets. Bobbie Jean is his female friend he didn’t get to say goodbye to. Eddie is going to go with him on the meeting across the river. Sandi hangs out with him on the boardwalk. Bobby got Janey pregnant and Mary loved Johnny with a love mean and true.
Comne to think of it, he sure uses a lot of first names in his songs.
I always thought it was an ingrained holdover from his Catholic education. Mary=the ideal woman, and all that.
And he and Frank went looking for lost cattle, way down south of the Rio Grande.