Adele Springsteen, Bruce Springsteen’s mother, has died at 98
Springsteen paid tribute to her in 'The Wish' and often brought her on stage to dance.
Bruce Springsteen’s mother, Adele Springsteen, died on Wednesday, the singer announced on social media Thursday.
Mrs. Springsteen was 98 and had been struggling with Alzheimer’s disease for more than a decade. Her son talked about her battle with the disease during his Springsteen on Broadway performances in 2021, when he brought back the show once theaters in New York reopened after the pandemic shutdown.
“My mother loves to dance,” he said. “She grew up in the ‘40s … with the big bands and the swing bands, and that was a time when dancing was an existential act. She’s 10 years into Alzheimer’s and that’s taken a lot away from us. But the need to dance hasn’t left her.”
“She can’t speak. She can’t stand. She can’t feed herself. But when she sees me, there is always a smile. Still a smile. And there’s still a kiss,” Springsteen said. “And there’s a sound which she makes when she sees me. It’s just the sound, but I know it means ‘I love you.’ And when I put on Glen Miller and she starts moving in her chair … she starts reaching out for me, to take her in my arms once more and to dance with her across the floor.”
When Mrs. Springsteen attended her son’s shows in New Jersey and in South Philadelphia — at the Spectrum for many decades, and more recently the Wells Fargo Center — he would sometimes bring her up on stage to dance during “Dancing in the Dark.” In 2009, during his final show at the Spectrum before the building was demolished, he went into the crowd to get her to sing along to “Waiting on a Sunny Day,” but she didn’t know the words.
Born Adele Zerilli into a Brooklyn Italian American family in 1925, Springsteen worked his mother’s family name into his immigrant song “American Land,” which shouts out “the McNicholases, the Posalskis, the Smiths, the Zerillis too.”
In his memoir, Born to Run, Springsteen writes about how his mother created a loving and supportive environment, while working as a legal secretary and serving as the main breadwinner for the family. That was in stark contrast to his often confrontational relationship with his father, Douglas, who died in 1998, which inspired psychological battlegrounds like “Adam Raised a Cain” and “Independence Day.”
Springsteen talked about how his mother, who bought him his first guitar, pulled him out onto the living room floor as a boy to dance to Chubby Checker’s “The Twist.” He also wrote of his mother taking him to the Steel Pier to see Checker lip-synch his hits. “Then we went across the boardwalk and caught Anita Bryant on the same sun-filled afternoon,” he writes.
On Thursday, Springsteen posted a video on Instagram of him dancing with his mother to a Glenn Miller song, along with these lyrics from “The Wish,” the song he performed on piano, in tribute to her in Springsteen on Broadway:
“I remember in the morning mom hearing your alarm clock ring. I’d lie in bed and listen to you getting ready for work, the sound of your makeup case on the sink. And the ladies at the office all lipstick, perfume and rustling skirts, how proud and happy you always looked walking home from work.
“It ain’t no phone call on Sunday, flowers or a Mother’s Day card. It ain’t no house on the hill with a garden and a nice little yard. I’ve got my hot rod down on Bond Street I’m older but you’ll know me in a glance. We’ll find us a little rock ‘n roll bar and we’ll go out and dance.”