64 Songs About Poverty and Homelessness

In the suburbs where I live, there's a tent city in the woods of a nearby community college. This homelessness is in part the result of urban sprawl, as several local low-rent housing alternatives—mobile home communities and residential campsites—have found more lucrative uses for their land.

Some former residents of those locations now find themselves castaways in their own hometown. They can be found with cardboard signs, panhandling at local stop signs or sitting on benches outside local stores. Some venture into the YMCA or the nearby Target to use the facilities.

There are no homeless shelters in this suburb. Those are located in the metropolitan area, 15 miles away. What's a person living on the streets to do?

If poverty and homelessness are issues close to your heart, we have a whole playlist worth of pop, rock, and country songs about the topic. Make a playlist and spread awareness about the problem today.

In this 1989 pop ballad, a cold, homeless woman cries as she beckons a stranger for help. Obviously suffering, she has blisters on her feet and can't walk. Rather than helping, however, the man does what it easy. He pretends not to hear her pleas, then whistles, and crosses the street to avoid her. What would you do?

A young man intending to end his life by suicide approaches a bridge in this 2006 country song. He is followed by an old homeless man who rises from his cardboard box shelter to share that his own life hasn't always been this way:

I've had my moments, days in the sun
Moments I was second to none
Moments when I knew I did what I thought I couldn't do
Like that plane ride coming home from the war
That summer my son was born
And memories like a coat so warm
A cold wind can't get through
Lookin' at me now you might not know it
But I've had my moments.

The tender exchange between strangers distracted the young man long enough for him to rethink his decision. Now, he looks back and wonders about how the homeless man must be sharing the story of his life-saving act. We are all capable of heroism.

In this 2008 country song, a man applies for a job and laments the state of the economy. Having lost his factory job when it closed and moved south, he's now looking for any kind of work to feed and clothe his family. The wolf is knocking at his family's door, and like too many others in his position, he's just trying to survive.

An anthem of America's blue collar workers, this 1982 rock song describes the decline of the steel industry in the rust belt of America and its impact on laid-off workers. People the age of Billy Joel's parents enjoyed a thriving working class life working in post-World War II industrial manufacturing, and their children were taught to expect a life at least as good as their parents'.

However, as cheap labor went overseas, opportunity dried up and the union provided little protection. Hordes of workers headed for the unemployment lines, unable to make ends meet. It left them disillusioned with the American dream.

This 2010 soul song was an international success. It features a man who is facing hard times ahead because he was fired from his job. Now he spends his time drinking. With no other options, he wants to trade his hard luck story for your money as a way of supporting himself.

This 1991 rock song is sung from the perspective of a homeless man who is illiterate and mentally ill, as his thoughts "arrive like butterflies" and he chases them away. With concrete as his pillow, the man drifts off after praying to a higher power that hasn't seemed to have helped him much so far.

Approximately 700 homeless people die each year in the United States due to exposure to the elements. On average, homeless people can expect to die 30 years prematurely.

Although Bobbie Gentry first introduced this song in 1969, it was country star Reba McEntire who made it famous in 1991. The classic country song describes a poverty-stricken single mother who lived in a shack outside of New Orleans with her two starving children. Seeing no other options, the terminally ill mother encouraged her 18-year-old daughter, Fancy, to prostitute herself as a means of making an independent living.

Years later, Fancy has grown from plain white trash to an astute businesswoman. She survived. Rather than blaming her late mother, she looks back on that difficult decision with empathy.

Ed Sheeran hit it out of the park with his 2011 debut single, which he wrote after visiting a homeless shelter. It's a tragic ballad about a young heroin-addicted prostitute who is half a breath away from homelessness as she struggles to make ends meet.
She is trapped in a deadly world of addiction and prostitution. Substance abuse has been documented as both a cause and a result of homelessness.

Bret Michaels wrote this sad 1990 power ballad to commemorate the loss of two important people in his life. His bodyguard and friend, Kimo, died alone in a Palm Springs Hotel Room on Christmas Eve 1989, the victim of a fast-paced lifestyle of drugs and alcohol that the band shared. The song also honors Michaels' cousin, a war-wounded Vietnam veteran.

The tune laments the inner anguish and unjust treatment that Vietnam vets faced after their service. It describes the homeless sleeping on the street as being "like bodies in an open grave." Sadly, more than one-quarter of homeless people are military veterans.

This Grammy-winning rock song from 1994 was featured in the movie Philadelphia. It won the Academy Award for Best Original Song and became an international hit. The movie brought attention to the issue of HIV/AIDS, a huge social stigma at the time. The rate of HIV/AIDS among homeless people is three times that in the general population.

In the song, the narrator describes being bruised, battered, and a shell of his former self. As he wanders the streets of the City of Brotherly Love, he fears dying lonely:

I saw my reflection in a window, I didn't know my own face
Oh, brother are you gonna leave me wastin' away
On, the streets of Philadelphia?

Each year, about 700 homeless people die from hypothermia, and the man in this sad country song from 2002 was on his way to becoming a victim. In the freezing weather, he lay curled up behind some garbage cans, trying his best to stay warm.

A stranger gave him a gentle shake and asked if he was okay. He woke but said that he wished the stranger had left him alone because he was dreaming of how things used to be, and he was almost home.

In this 1984 rock song, the legendary rock group shines a light on the suffering and loneliness of the hungry and asks what God would think of this world that we created. The song was part of the 1985 Live Aid concert to raise funds for Ethiopian famine relief.

Unfortunately, despite organizers' best intentions, the country was embroiled in civil war and much of the $283 million raised was used for arms rather than food.

Dirty, dead broke, and ashamed, a man who lives on the streets wanders into a homeless mission in this 2001 country song. He's looking for bread, water, and a place to lay his head. The woman at the shelter welcomes him to the table and offers him friendship and spiritual guidance in addition to the meal he seeks.

In this 1993 rock song, a young man, himself down to his last dollar, describes a panhandler whom he regularly sees on the streets. The stranger stays wrapped in a blanket, the only home he knows. The narrator wonders if the homeless man's family knows that he is alive and safe, and when the homeless man moves on, he worries about his welfare.

Like many people, I always assumed this 1982 reggae-infused pop song was a positive one, but I wasn't paying enough attention to the lyrics. Were you?

It refers to violence in the streets of a real place in London and tells the story of a poor man who admires many things in life that he cannot afford:

Workin' so hard like a soldier
Can't afford a thing on TV
Deep in my heart I'm a warrior
Can't get food for the kids, good God.

The subject of this 1999 metal song has lost their job and the power and prestige that came with it. As he continues to sink into depression and poverty, he spends any remaining money on drugs to numb his feelings of dejection. As a result, he relies on free food for meals. About one in seven Americans rely on food banks to get by.

In this 1988 pop song, the narrator is a dreamer who desperately seeks to claw and scrape herself out of poverty. With little formal education and a broken family life, she relies on her own meager savings from a convenience store job to escape her surroundings.

Her partner's contribution is a fast car that takes them to a different situation where they repeat the same cycle of low-paid work, minimal savings, and failing to advance in any significant way economically. Still, she dreams of something better.

Among others who are short on hope, the hungry and homeless walk this life looking for understanding angels who walk the street and can lend a sympathetic hand. This 2006 Christian contemporary song encourages us all to be a force of positive change in someone else's life.

For other songs about changing your little corner of the world, make yourself a playlist and stay true to your mission in making a difference.

The narrator in this 1994 country song remembers his father as a thrifty, simple man. The family was poor when he was young, and he was jealous of his friends whose families were more affluent. However, his dad emphasized the truisms that "It's what inside that really matters" and "Love is the one thing that money can't buy." He upholds and celebrates those values now that he is an adult.

This man feels like he's out of options in life. He's in a very dark place. The 2013 folk rock song features a narrator who left his hometown on a Greyhound bus but now sits in his pickup truck in a Walmart parking lot only a half-mile from where he grew up. A deep sense of failure gnaws at his insides.

He has nowhere to go and has been living out of his vehicle. His chances of having a good life have evaporated: "I'm getting old. Got no place to go. It's all come unwound."

He keeps looking at his lighter and his 10 gallons of propane. He ponders hard whether he'll torch the vehicle and the store. Such desperate times.