THE READING ROOM: Erin Osmon’s ‘Won’t Back Down: Heartland Rock and the Fight for America’
Every now and then a book comes along and pulls back a curtain on tired ways of thinking, revealing the breadth and depth of movements or ideas that we’d taken for granted. Erin Osmon’s richly textured Won’t Back Down: Heartland Rock and the Fight
Black News 
Every now and then a book comes along and pulls back a curtain on tired ways of thinking, revealing the breadth and depth of movements or ideas that we’d taken for granted. Erin Osmon’s richly textured Won’t Back Down: Heartland Rock and the Fight for America (Norton, April 28, 2026) is just that book, and the seasoned music journalist conducts us on a decades-long journey through a fraught time in American politics and the rise of soundtrack that gave voice to individuals the politicians ignored and left behind.
By the 1980s, American society had been riding a roller coaster of social and economic changes. While the Vietnam War might have ended in 1975, veterans of the war flooded their hometowns, carrying with them deep psychic scars of the horrors of war. In addition, veterans moving back home to take up jobs they might have behind discovered that such work had dried up as mills and factories or stores had moved overseas or to larger cities. Farmers found themselves working harder to make ends meet during these years because of dramatic ups and downs in the economy. Rising out of such social and economic shifts, the songs of Jackson Browne, Bruce Springsteen, Bonnie Raitt, Tom Petty, and Bob Seger (among others) captured the mindless repetition of these numbing struggles. Although Browne’s 1976 song “The Pretender” falls a few years before Osmon’s book opens, the lyrics well convey the frustrations of a person who packs his lunch and goes to work each day “Caught between the longing for love/ And the struggle for the legal tender.”
