"Brother Can You Spare A Dime?"
"Brother, Can You Spare A Dime" Day Promo CD, 1993
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There’s a great compilation called Forgotten Orphans. Some fans put it together shortly after Tom released his official comp Orphans. As you might guess from the clever title, Forgotten Orphans collects songs that could have been included on Orphans — b-sides, covers, soundtrack tunes, other assorted oddities — but weren’t.
One such forgotten orphan is Tom’s cover of “Brother Can You Spare A Dime?” (though he sings it “buddy,” not “brother”). He recorded the Depression-era standard for National Homeless Month in November 1993. That year, November 16 was declared “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? Day” by the Yip Harburg Foundation, the National Coalition for the Homeless, and several record industry groups. In an article about the event, the Washington Post called “Brother Can You Spare A Dime?” “the first popular song to treat the human wreckage of the Depression seriously.”
To promote “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? Day,” a promo CD went out to 4,500 radio stations containing 20 different covers of the song. Nineteen of those covers were old. One was new: Tom’s.
Tom makes sense as the one artist to record a new version. He’s long sung about the down and out generally, and been an advocate for the homeless specifically. He’s written about the unhoused in his own songs like “On the Nickel” and “Cold Water.” He dueted with one, in a sense, in “Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet.” In 2011, he even released a chapbook poem to raise funds for the homeless in northern California. The lengthy poem ends:
Daddy why are all those men
Sleeping outside in the rain?
Why don't they go home
Where it is warm and dry?
Why don't they go home
Where it is warm and dry?
And he donates his songs to projects supporting the unhoused. A few weeks ago we looked at “Bottom of the World,” written for a documentary about tramps living their lives in boxcars. He also wrote “Take Care of All of My Children” for Streetwise, a 1984 documentary about homeless teenagers in Seattle.
And in 2008, Tom, who you may have heard kinda famously doesn’t like his songs being used in TV ads, did allow an ad to use his song. He gave “Never Let Go” to be used in a TV spot for anti-hunger charity Feeding America. It was reportedly the first time he’d actually allowed a song of his to be used in an advertisement.
“Brother Can You Spare A Dime?” would have been a good candidate for Orphans. Though now it’s all over YouTube, when it came out in the ‘90s it would have been almost entirely inaccessible, since that radio promo CD wasn’t for sale to the public. His version sounds next to nothing like Bone Machine, his most recent album at the time. Spare and haunted, with plonky guitar and, starting in the second verse, low strings, it’s one of his great covers.