Brother Can You Spare A Dime Analysis

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“Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” is a simple song, but the lyrics make it very powerful and really touch your heart. Based during the Great Depression era, this song was written about the struggle that the song writer went through just to get a job and to survive. Some of the jobs he mentions are working on the railroad, building dams, etc. Just by looking at the title, we can already learn quite a bit. He uses the word “Brother”, which seems to be referring to the people he is asking for help. He calls them his “brothers" because he knows that they are going through the same struggle that he is. But, because he is so desperate, he still feels like he needs to ask them for their help. Now, we can look at “Can you spare a dime?”. I believe that …show more content…

You can tell that the writer was constantly looking for and doing hard jobs. He was working hard and earning money, and was expecting peace and glory to come from it. But, he never truly understood why he had to accept the handouts given to him. In the final lines of the song, you can see that jobs were running out, meaning that the writer didn’t have a job anymore. Because he didn’t have any work, he started to ask people for a dime. This line in the song, “Once in khaki suits, gee, we looked swell, Full of that Yankee Doodly Dum, Half a million boots went slogging through Hell, And I was the kid with the drum”, has a lot of meaning. It shows that the writer wasn’t always poor and that he could afford Khaki suits once, but now he has to go through the same struggle that “half a million” other people go through. The final line “Oh, say, don't you remember? They called me ‘Al’, It was 'Al' all the time, Say, don't you remember? I'm your pal, Buddy, can you spare a dime?”, also has quite a bit of meaning. It shows that because the Great Depression took everything away from everyone, the writer’s friends don’t even recognize him anymore. This shows how hard of a time the Great Depression

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