Fifty years after their 1973 debut albums on Columbia Records, Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel have had dozens of high 10 hits, offered a whole lot of tens of millions of data, and proceed to fill arenas and stadiums. Their success is undisputed and their legacies safe. What doesn’t typically obtain consideration is how, a half-century later, the suburban roots of each males nonetheless play a key position in shaping the contours of these legacies.

By the center of the Twentieth century, New York City had developed a definite musical tradition that mirrored its polyglot character. From earlier eras, the metropolis had spawned minstrelsy, Broadway present tunes, and the Tin Pan Alley recordings, producing famous person performers like Irving Berlin and Tony Bennett. Gotham was additionally the nexus of the nation’s radio, document, and tv industries.

And but at the same time as this was taking place, conventional American standard music met a revolt from the hinterlands. The Mississippi Delta produced an array of younger artists with distinctive musical approaches, from Robert Johnson to Elvis Presley; the hollers of Appalachia spawned Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn; the dirty industrial port of Liverpool generated the Beatles and the British invasion that adopted of their wake. For younger individuals at the time—amongst them Joel and Springsteen, each born in 1949—these contemporary new abilities had been the defining figures of the age.

The two males noticed themselves as heirs of a brand new custom that included innovators like Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and Bob Dylan—all of whom hailed not from the city northeast however from the nation’s inside.

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But whereas they actually discovered inspiration and concepts from past New York, the two future stars had been essentially rooted in the booming music panorama of the higher New York space. During their youth, Broadway’s Brill Building was a success manufacturing unit. Teams of writers like Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, Carole King and Gerry Goffin, and Howard Greenfield and Cynthia Weil churned out an array of stylish pop hits for figures that included the Shirelles, the Drifters, and Dionne Warwick. There had been additionally figures like Dion and the Belmonts (of the Bronx) and Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons (out of Newark) with grittier sounds and extra working class stylings.

The city sprawl of metropolitan New York that made it a cultural driver of American society deeply influenced these artists and writers. Most of them had been outer-borough or city-adjacent figures with ethnic origins that didn’t match into the Black-white racial binary of the American South that was the cradle of a lot American music. Many had Jewish or Italian roots, which, in mid-Twentieth century United States, made them racially ambiguous. The Brill Building writers additionally routinely included Latin components and accents into their songs, components typically handled with disdain by each elitist document firm executives in the Fifties in addition to those that prized “pristine” folks music on school campuses and coffeehouses in the early Nineteen Sixties.

This sprawling New York panorama with its culturally numerous roots formed Joel and Springsteen as the two youngsters—who had lived remarkably comparable lives—solid careers in the late Nineteen Sixties. Both males grew up on the metropolitan periphery: Joel in Hicksville, Long Island, and Springsteen in Freehold, N.J. They had been born into worlds the place potato farms had been nonetheless frequent options of the native panorama, quickly changed by the new crop of cheaply produced mass housing. Commuter-based transportation put the metropolis in attain however simply past easy entry, making it each alluring and distant. But amid this rising affluence, each had been additionally merchandise of downward mobility, with Joel deserted by his company government father and Springsteen’s grandfather, a lawyer, going to jail. Both determined in highschool that music could be their vocation, and each struggled to comprehend their ambitions in a milieu the place school was an expectation that they rejected.

In 1973, Springsteen and Joel signed with Columbia Records and launched their first albums for the label. Within months, the music business labeled each industrial disappointments. In the subsequent few years, additionally they each had severe conflicts with their managers that imperiled their careers. In the late Nineteen Seventies, nonetheless, Joel and Springsteen achieved breakthroughs, and by the Eighties—the age of MTV—each had been superstars.

Read extra: Why Suburban American Homeowners Were Accused of Being a ‘Profit-Making Cartel’ in the Nineteen Seventies

The New York suburban tradition that they grew up in helped outline each males’s work. Frank Sinatra’s Hoboken—for that matter, Jay Gatsby’s West Egg—loomed massive over albums like Born to Run and The Stranger, which straddled metropolis and suburban settings. Indeed, the Route 9 romanticized in Born to Run was in actual fact a seemingly infinite strip of automotive dealerships and fast-food eating places. This metropolitan tradition—each a racial mix and a category divide, together with a romanticism about the metropolis— gave songs as numerous as Joel’s “New York State of Mind” and Springsteen’s “Jungleland” and “Johnny 99″ their stories, as well as a truly complex sound that incorporated Black, Latin, and country elements filtered through a network of radio stations, record labels and concert circuits that projected this sound into the national mainstream.

The bedrock of Springsteen’s work was an African American rhythm & blues tradition to which he has remained committed—Springsteen, a lifelong Roman Catholic, still performs live as if he’s a Baptist preacher leading a congregation. When he was developing his signature style on the beaches of Asbury Park, Springsteen was influenced by the distinctive accents of the “Shore Sound,” a rhythm-and-blues variant characterized by the horns that flourished on the club scene. Early practitioners included the New Jersey-based Young Rascals, best known for their hits “Good Lovin,’” “Groovin,’” and “People Gotta to Be Free,” as well as Looking Glass, whose hit “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” topped the Billboard pop chart in 1972. The Shore Sound—captured most obviously in saxophone solos by E Street Band member Clarence Clemons— infused Springsteen albums like “The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle” in addition to fan favorites similar to “Tenth Avenue Freezeout.”

Joel’s palette was extra variegated. His first album, Piano Man, opened with the bluegrass observe “Travelin’ Prayer”—instantly coated by Earl Scruggs and later by Dolly Parton—and in the years that adopted he tapped ragtime, reggae, and fusion jazz, amongst different genres. His 1983 album An Innocent Man, which spawned six top-40 singles, paid homage to Motown, Soul, doo-wop, and, not coincidentally, the Brill Building. His metro New York roots are evident in hits like “Uptown Girl,” which feels like a Four Seasons track, and the Burt Bachrachesque “Leave a Tender Moment Alone.” The hallmark of Joel’s originality is mimicry, a canny means to place a singular spin on his ancestors. But his dedication to the area can also be thematic, mirrored in the suburban ennui of “Captain Jack” and the nostalgic narrator of “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant.” The very title of his 1982 album “The Nylon Curtain” anchored its songs in a suburban milieu, as did the back-cover picture of Joel sitting on his yard porch.

Both males had been at coronary heart integrationists. Joel named his eldest daughter after his hero Ray Charles, as protean a musician as this nation has ever produced. Like Charles, Joel soaked up genres, however in placing his personal stamp on the traditions he beloved was no extra a cultural appropriator than Charles was in performing his magnificent model of Jewish immigrant Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.”

Despite their similarities, critics loved Springsteen, while treating Joel as a punching bag. Yet Joel sold more records. He was also, musically speaking, a much more intricate composer of pop hits. Springsteen himself has described Joel songs as “built like the Rock of Gibraltar.”

Read more: Library of Congress Declares Billy Joel, Gloria Gaynor, Metallica Songs Important Parts of U.S. History

In the early 1990s, both men’s stars began to wane. After 1993’s River of Dreams, Joel stopped releasing albums of new songs with lyrics, though Springsteen has continued producing records into the 2020s. Nonetheless, both men have resisted retirement, and have retained a multigenerational fan base that includes Vampire Weekend, Taylor Swift, and Olivia Rodrigo. But they tend to be more admired than imitated.

Meanwhile, the world into which they were born continues to evolve. The real estate markets where they grew up have gentrified; suburban New York has become more racially diverse. Popular music moved on from rock & roll to hip-hop, another outer-borough phenomenon that reflected a different set of preoccupations. (Springsteen gestured at it in his 1994 hit “Streets of Philadelphia.”) Like Rudy Vallee and Bing Crosby before them, Joel and Springsteen are becoming historical artifacts. Stars fade. But their light lingers long after they’re gone. 

Jim Cullen teaches historical past at Greenwich Country Day School in Greenwich, Conn.,and is the writer of Bridge & Tunnel Boys: Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, and the Metropolitan Sound of the American Century. Made by History takes readers past the headlines with articles written and edited by skilled historians. Learn extra about Made by History at TIME right here.