I had to go to Woonsocket Wednesday to deliver some boxes to a museum so that they could be collected by yet another organization. On the way, I had company in form of our Assistant Registrar, and one of the things we talk about is music. I told him I’d been appalled by myself on Monday, by the stereotypical spectacle I’d made driving a Subaru Outback whilst listening to Bruce Springsteen turned way up with the windows rolled down: Soccer Mom Rocks out on Sunny Day. The only thing that saves me is that I am not, in fact, a soccer mom. I am Re-enactor Mom and Dungeons and Dragons Mom, but let’s not go there right now.

On Monday, I’d been at the Department of Motor Vehicles, where I passed the time reading the profile of Springsteen in the July 30 New Yorker. (Cars and roads! Songs about cars! and roads!). I was struck by Springsteen’s incredible focus–his bloody-minded obsession, you could call it, with music and with success. His life wasn’t easy or lovely, even if he never “worked” in the sense of having a laboring job, he worked hard at being a musician and a human being. And I found that enlightening, and I also found his wide-ranging musical interests enlightening.

This goes someplace relevant, I promise you.

When I was a teenager, the first music I listened to was my parents’. My father had a thing for stereo equipment, and I was lucky enough to get his HeathKit cast-offs. He and my mother had a collection of records, first issues of Bob Dylan and Flatt & Scruggs and Cream and classical, too. So the first album I remember really knowing was Blood on the Tracks, because I liked the stories. The politics of Dylan appealed to me, too, in the post-Nixon years with the Bomb still looming. After Dylan came Elvis, and then the other Elvis (Costello), who sounded strange and jarring and metallic and completely intriguing. From there, I went to punk.

Punk, and country. I saw the Replacements when I took a bus to the show, and they were hardly old enough to drive, and I remember vividly their cover of Hank Williams’ “Hey Good Lookin’.” We listened to country at home (in this era, it was disco or country or classical on the radio), Tanya Tucker and Loretta Lynn. And then there was the album a girl with an older brother in boarding school played for me, Born to Run.

I saw Springsteen, too, before I saw the Replacements. I remember buying Darkness on the Edge of Town, I remember buying The River, and I remember the concert. After that, it was all punk shows, 5 bands for 5 bucks at the Centro America Social Club on the North Side of Chicago. And all the while I still listened to Springsteen, Holiday in Cambodia followed by Nebraska.

By the time I got to college and had my own radio show, I knew enough not to tell people I liked Springsteen. It was the Reagan era, and Born in the USA had been co-opted. But in the art school studios, there was Kitty Wells and Patsy Cline and R.E.M. and I made work based on Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha novels, shacks and houses and rooms on stilts because I was in a river city, with floods and flood plains and shot gun shacks.

What the heck does this have to do with reenacting or costumes? you ask. Bring on the bonnets! I know, I love bonnets too.

Here’s what it has to do with now: now I work in a history museum. I’m the keeper of the evidence room of the past, the very stuff of American history and identity. And I don’t listen to the Dead Kennedys anymore, though I do still listen to the Chicago punk bands. More than that, I listen to Wilco and R.E.M. and, yes, Bruce. I hear an American sound, a kind of universalism–and I know he doesn’t appeal to everyone, or speak for, or to, everyone.

But one of the things I think Springsteen gets at with his music is American identity, and American history. He’s listened to the blues, and listened to Guthrie, and you can hear that. He’s listened to people’s stories, and his best music tells other people’s stories. So do the best museums: they tell people’s stories, and make you listen, and make you care.

And that’s what the what the best re-enacting and best costuming does, too: it tells people stories, and makes them care, about the past we share.