The AMERICAN LAND EDITION contains five bonus tracks and, in addition to the DVD documentary included in previous editions, four bonus live videos from the 2006 tour.

Personnel: Bruce Springsteen (vocals, guitar, mandolin, harmonica, piano, Hammond b-3 organ, tambourine, percussion); Frank Bruno (vocals, guitar); Mark Clifford (vocals, banjo); Sam Bardfeld, Soozie Tyrell (vocals, violin); Charlie Giordano (vocals, accordion, piano, Hammond b-3 organ, pump organ); Eddie Manion (vocals, saxophone); Mark Pender (vocals, trumpet); Richie "La Bamba" Rosenberg (vocals, trombone); Jeremy Chatzky (vocals, upright bass); Larry Eagle (vocals, drums, percussion); Patti Scialfa, Lisa Lowell (vocals); Art Baron (tuba).

Bruce Springsteen is certainly no stranger to acoustic-based, folk-inspired music. He began his career as a post-Dylan troubadour, and he's been making "unplugged" albums as far back as 1982's NEBRASKA. He's already recorded Woody Guthrie material, so it's not a shock that he would release a tribute album to folk icon Pete Seeger. WE SHALL OVERCOME: THE SEEGER SESSIONS celebrates not just Seeger's musical influence, of course, but also the political stands the singer took, which obviously resonate with the famously progressive Springsteen.

Unlike NEBRASKA, though, this is no bare-bones affair. The E Street Band may be absent, but Bruce tackles Seeger's tunes in classic larger-than-life Boss style, with a huge band that includes several string players, a horn section, accordion, and more. Incorporating everything from Dixieland to zydeco into the folk/blues template, Bruce stirs up a rowdy cauldron of Americana teeming with as much pure human passion as social import. WE SHALL OVERCOME is likely to be one of the biggest albums ever made under the "traditional folk" banner, but it's full of small surprises as Springsteen gets to the spiritual and musical heart of the matter.

We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions is an unusual Bruce Springsteen album in a number of ways. First, it's the first covers album Springsteen has recorded in his three-decade career, which is a noteworthy event in itself, but that's not the only thing different about We Shall Overcome. Springsteen, a notorious perfectionist who has been known to tweak and rework albums numerous times before releasing them (or scrapping them, as the case may be), pulled together the album quickly, putting aside a planned second volume of the rarities collection Tracks after discovering a set of recordings he made in 1997 for a Pete Seeger tribute album called Where Have All the Flowers Gone: The Songs of Pete Seeger. Enthralled by this handful of tracks -- one of which, "We Shall Overcome," appeared on the tribute -- Springsteen decided to cut a whole album of folk tunes popularized by Pete Seeger. He rounded up 13 musicians, including some who played on those 1997 sessions, and did two one-day sessions in late 2005 and early 2006, swiftly releasing the resulting album that April. As Bruce stresses in his introductory liner notes, these were live recordings, done with no rehearsals, and We Shall Overcome does indeed have an unmistakably loose feel, and not just because you can hear the Boss call out chord changes in a handful of songs. This music is rowdy and rambling, as the group barrels head-first into songs that they're playing together as a band for the first time, and it's hard not to get swept up along in their excitement. Springsteen has made plenty of great records, but We Shall Overcome is unique in its sheer kinetic energy; he has never made a record that feels as alive as this.

Not only does We Shall Overcome feel different than Bruce's work; it also feels different than Seeger's music. Most of Seeger's recordings were spare and simple, featuring just him and his banjo; his most elaborately produced records were with the Weavers, whose recordings of the '50s did feature orchestration, yet that's a far cry from the big folk band that Springsteen uses here. Bruce's combo for the Seeger sessions has a careening, ramshackle feel that's equal parts early-'60s hootenanny and Bob Dylan and the Band's Americana; at times, its ragged human qualities also recall latter-day Tom Waits, although the music here is nowhere near as self-consciously arty as that. Springsteen has truly used Seeger's music as inspiration, using it as the starting point to take him someplace that is uniquely his own in sheer musical terms. Given that, it should be no great surprise that Bruce also picks through Seeger's songbook in a similar fashion, leaving many (if not most) of Pete's well-known songs behind in favor of a selection of folk standards Springsteen learned through Seeger's recordings. (Author/critic Dave Marsh researched the origins of each song here; there are brief introductions within the album's liner notes and thorough histories presented on the official Springsteen site.) While the songs featured here adhere to no one specific theme -- there are work songs, spirituals, narratives, and protest songs -- it is possible to see this collection of tunes as Springsteen's subtle commentary on the political state of America, especially given Seeger's reputation as an outspoken political activist, but this record should hardly be judged as merely an old-fashioned folk record. We Shall Overcome is many things, but a creaky relic is not one of them. Springsteen has drawn from Seeger's songbook -- which he assembled in the '40s, '50s, and '60s from traditional folk songs -- and turned it into something fresh and contemporary. And even if you have no patience for (or interest in) the history of the songs, or their possible meanings, it's easy to enjoy We Shall Overcome on pure musical terms: it's a rambunctious, freewheeling, positively joyous record unlike any other in Springsteen's admittedly rich catalog.

[We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions was released in the U.S. as a DualDisc, containing a CD on one side and a DVD on the other. The CD side merely contains the album. The DVD contains the album in PCM stereo (there's no 5.1 mix, although given the big-band nature of this session, this album would have sounded great in Surround Sound), along with two bonus tracks, the rollicking "Buffalo Gals" and the moody, soulful "How Can I Keep from Singing." Both bonus cuts are excellent and should have been on the album proper. There is also a 30-minute video program that chronicles some of the recording of the album, but it's not a documentary: it's more of a performance film with commentary, and while it could have been longer or had more commentary, it's still quite enjoyable. Finally, We Shall Overcome also was released separately as a vinyl LP.] ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine

DVD Features:

Track List

1. John Henry

2. Pay Me My Money Down

3. Buffalo Gals

4. Erie Canal

5. O Mary Don't You Weep

6. Jacob's Ladder

7. Froggie Went A Courtin'

8. Shenandoah

Bonus Tracks

9. How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times And Live (Bruce Springsteen Version)

10. Bring 'Em Home

11. American Land

12. Pay Me My Money Down

Rolling Stone (p.57) - 4 stars out of 5 -- "[W]ith his first-ever album of songs written by other people, it feels like he's turned to the music of our shared past to find a moral compass for a nation that's gone off the rails."

Rolling Stone (p.106) - Ranked #29 in Rolling Stone's "The Top 50 Albums Of 2006" -- "These big-band treatments combine Dixieland brass, cantina accordions and barn-dance fiddles..."

Entertainment Weekly (p.134) - "Enlivened by flailing banjos, tub-thumping horns, and hopped up accordions....[He] isn't afraid to mix in some merriment with the message." -- Grade: A-

Q (p.112) - 3 stars out of 5 -- "[I]t's good to hear Springsteen with the pressure off, tapping deep into the bedrock of American music and singing and playing for the sheer joy of it."

Q (p.125) - Ranked #16 in Q Magazine's "100 Greatest Albums of 2006" -- "[I]t proved to be a rip-roaring, ramshackle masterstroke."

No Depression (p.123) - "[T]he] album deftly balances such deeply spiritual forays with a lot of upbeat material....Bringing a deep personal connection to some of the most quintessentially American songs ever written."

Mojo (Publisher) (p.100) - 4 stars out of 5 -- "It takes easily five seconds to discover this is a Springsteen as you've never heard him before....A big band of little-knowns tumbles and jumbles diverse folk idioms all around him..."