This isn’t a song about amazing musicianship, surprising chord changes or nifty little hooks. Rather, it’s a tribute to the power of lyrics.
Of all the Great American Songwriters of our time, Randy Newman is perhaps the only one who could be considered a continuation of the line of classic songwriters from before our time. His deft combination of Broadway show tunes with contemporary pop follows a similar prescription for success enjoyed by Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and George Gershwin.
And while I’m generally not the biggest fan of the albums under his own name, the dude was on a certifiable roll in the early ’70s. Sail Away and Good Old Boys together make an unbeatable one-two punch in the history of popular music.
Even when Randy Newman wasn’t writing for movies or plays, as when he focused more on being a successful professional songwriter in his early years, the character sketches he always thrived on combined with traditional pop structures to make each song seem as if it was meant for one. The words conjure up vivid imagery and bashed up against the lush orchestration that often accompanies his tunes, creating an imaginary movie in your head.
What really gets the songs to demand attention, though, are the way he paints those characters. He can write a real pretty love song but Newman is more inclined not to elicit any sympathy from listeners: He’s always been more interested in creating flawed, unseemly personalities doing unsavory things in order to make a statement on the duplicity and greed of modern society. And often, he does so by drawing historical references, as he was trying to do (I think) with “Louisiana 1927.”
As a result, Randy Newman’s heavily sarcastic wit was often sharper than a brand-new ice pick. Sometimes, though, he missed the mark to those only casually paying attention; that certainly happened with his left-field 1978 hit “Short People,” a dig at bigotry that got confused for bigotry itself.
But that actually wasn’t the first time he pointed out the folly of prejudice. In fact, “Short People” was pretty tame compared to “Rednecks,” the song that first appeared at the beginning of the Southern-themed Good Old Boys, released on Sept. 10, 1974.
The song was inspired by an episode on the Dick Cavett show Newman watched that had newly elected Georgia Gov. Lester Maddox on as a guest. Without making this too much of a history lesson in Southern politics, Maddox had a reputation as a segregationist that he was trying to shake off. Cavett didn’t seem to let him. Maddox got mad and walked off the show.
That inspired Randy Newman to write a song about racism against African-Americans, narrating from the point of view of a “redneck,” and even opens the song stating why he wrote it:
Last night I saw Lester Maddox on a TV show
With some smart-ass New York Jew
And the Jew laughed at Lester Maddox
And the audience laughed at Lester Maddox too.
Well, he may be a fool but he’s our fool
If they think they’re better than him they’re wrong
So I went to the park and I took some paper along
And that’s where I made this song
Randy Newman has always loved to use ridicule to make a point and judging from much of “Rednecks,” he seems to be ridiculing Southerners. But what he’s really doing here is ridiculing Northerners who ridicule Southerners. Specifically, he mocks the idea that blacks are free in the North, saying instead they are only:
… free to be put in a cage in Harlem in New York City
And he’s free to be put in a cage in the South-Side of Chicago, the West-Side
And he’s free to be put in a cage in Hough in Cleveland
And he’s free to be put in a cage in East St. Louis
And he’s free to be put in a cage in Fillmore in San Francisco
And he’s free to be put in a cage in Roxbury in Boston
They’re gatherin’ ’em up from miles around
Keepin’ the n—–s down
It’s not all that hard to understand where he was coming from when you consider that Randy Newman himself is an adopted Southerner, having spent parts of his childhood in New Orleans. He doesn’t like what he’s seen from his fellow Southerners, but he doesn’t like what he sees as hypocrisy, either.
The venom spewed here is not sugar-coated, but it is softened by being wrapped in clever satire. The colorful language warbled by Randy Newman is contrasted by the vaudevillian arrangement and the pedal steel in the chorus, used to underscore the narrator’s hillbilly sensibilities. His thinking man’s rants aren’t some gimmick; it’s just his trademark, and when it works as it does here, it’s genius.
And what did Lester Maddox himself think of Randy Newman’s opening lines to the song? He was said to be offended most of all to Newman’s rude reference to a Jewish man. The irony was complete: Newman himself is, of course, of Jewish ancestry.
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