““All my friends—beep!— are so—beep!—small town / My parents—beep!—live in the same small—beep!—town.” –John Mellencamp and his spell-checking typewriter, as recounted to the Wall Street Journal, September 27, 2016
John Mellencamp never won any spelling bees.
“I’m the worst speller in the world,” he told the Wall Street Journal in 2016, so one day in 1984 his wife (at the time) gifted him with a high-end typewriter with a built-in spell-checker.
Unfortunately his high-end device had a low-end owner’s manual, and try as he might, Mellencamp couldn’t figure out how to make the thing correct his mistakes.
As it turns out, it couldn’t: the typewriter recognized misspelled words as they were typed, but it lacked the computing power to autocorrect them. That was left up to the typist, which Mellencamp didn’t and couldn’t understand.
“Well, I guess I’m just a stupid hillbilly,” he recalls muttering to himself. “What do I know? I was born in a small town.”
Struck by what he’d just said, Mellencamp picked up his guitar, strummed a chord, and started typing.
I was born in a small town And I live in a small town
Except he was both spelling and typing challenged, so as typed, the machine beeped along in accompaniment–much to the merriment of his wife and aunt, who he heard laughing upstairs.
Mellencamp ignored the laughter until he was done writing. And once he played his new song for his wife and aunt, the laughter stopped altogether.
“They went dead quiet,” Mellencamp remembers. “When you play what you’ve done for a family member and you get that kind of reaction, you know you have something.”
He had something.
“Small Town” was Mellencamp’s paean to Seymour, Indiana, his birthplace, and to his adopted hometown of Bloomington. Both places served as archetypes for the kind of small town America already starting to vanish, but his ode to his small town roots resonated far beyond Indiana.
It became a hit single off of Mellencamp’s 1985 Scarecrow album, peaking at #6 on the Hot 100, a position it held for only one week before losing it to Bruce Springsteen’s latest single.
What song of Bruce’s kept John’s from climbing higher? Ironically, it was Springsteen’s own salute to his small town roots: “My Hometown.”
Given the close comparisons often made between the two men (Mellencamp often quipped he’d always felt like “the poor man’s Bruce Springsteen”), one would think they’d eventually play “Small Town” together once they crossed paths.
It didn’t happen until 2024, though, and it might not have happened even then if Bruce actually knew the song well enough.
Their spontaneous duet happened on April 24, 2024, at the American Music Honors festivities at Monmouth University. After inducting Mellencamp into the honor roll, he started playing “Small Town,” with the Disciples of Soul, the evening’s house band.
It started out just fine. Bruce led the band through the first three verses without incident. But then as he started the fourth verse, he changed key too early, and the band launched into the bridge while Bruce was still singing a verse.
Mellencamp instantly recognized the train wreck about to happen and leaped onto the stage. After a few awkward moments, he took over the lead and held the song together until the actual bridge kicked in.
Their one-time-only performance of “Small Town” wasn’t the tightest, but it revealed how comfortable and brotherly the two men had become, almost forty years on from the the time their hometown songs crossed paths.
Small Town First performed: April 24, 2024 (West Long Branch, NJ) Last performed: April 24, 2024 (West Long Branch, NJ)
© July 12, 2026