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‘Good Old Boys’: Behind Randy Newman’s Subversive Masterpiece
Warner Music
In Depth

‘Good Old Boys’: Behind Randy Newman’s Subversive Masterpiece

A biting satire on Southern US politics, Randy Newman’s 1974 album, ‘Good Old Boys’ is an enduring classic with challenging subject matter.

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Inspiration, if you’re a songwriter of Randy Newman’s calibre, at least, can come from the most everyday experiences. One evening in 1970, Newman was kicking back, like millions of others across North American, watching late-night talk-show The Dick Cavett Show. That evening, the guest was Lester Maddox, then the governor of the state of Georgia, who’d come to political prominence as a strict segregationist. The former owner of a grill restaurant, he’d refused to serve Black customers, in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1965, and he’d used the notoriety the incident gave him as a springboard into politics. For one of the greatest songwriters in history, this was rich material, and a bitingly satirical album, Good Old Boys, began to take shape.

Listen to ‘Good Old Boys’ here.

The inspiration: “I hate everything that he stands for”

The show’s treatment of Maddox got Newman thinking. “They sat him next to [civil-rights activist and NFL great] Jim Brown, the audience hooted at him, and he didn’t say a word,” Newman told Performing Songwriter in 1995. “Maddox didn’t get a chance to be bad on that show. And I thought, Now, I hate everything that he stands for, but they didn’t give him a chance to be an idiot. And here he is, governor of a state – these people elected him in Georgia, however many million people voted for him – and I thought that if I were a Georgian, I would be angry. I would be angry anyway, even if I were a nice, liberal, editor of the journal in Atlanta.”

Written in response to Maddox’s appearance, the incendiary song Rednecks was a country-funk stormer sung from the perspective of a fictional character, Johnny Cutler – an Alabama steel worker aggrieved at Maddox’s treatment from a “smart-ass New York Jew” (Dick Cavett was actually a Nebraska-born gentile; Newman would later allow, “There are some mistakes in it, like, that guy wouldn’t know the names of all those ghettos, but, so what”). In the song, Newman’s character retaliates with what seems like a no-holds-barred defence of Southern bigotry (“We’re rednecks, we’re rednecks/We don’t know our ass from a hole in the ground/We’re rednecks, we’re rednecks/We’re keepin’ the n_____s down”).

Newman doesn’t merely expose such despicable views; his lyrics hint at the fears that lead to such dehumanising rhetoric: fear of marginalisation, of the unfamiliar, of redundance. Yet there’s also a self-awareness in Cutler’s glorification of his beliefs that suggests Newman could be sending up the caricature that Northern liberal elites have of the South, implying that they are just as guilty of prejudice. And Newman adds another layer in the song’s coda, pointing to the Northern cities whose own planning laws have all but effected segregation in another name. Still, such nuances could be easily lost on crowds, as Newman told Malcolm Gladwell, in an interview for the Revisionist History podcast: “Southern audiences started yelling for it so they could sing along with the chorus. When I thought that that was happening, I stopped playing in the South.”

The character: “I had to explain this guy in the song more”

Rednecks provided a spark for Newman, who quickly wrote two more songs – Marie and Birmingham – for Johnny Cutler. “I felt like I had to explain this guy in the song more,” Newman wrote in the sleevenotes for the expanded reissue of 1974’s Good Old Boys. “You know, give him a job and a wife. So that’s what I did.”

Marie is one of the best Randy Newman songs. A heartbreaking ballad that finds Cutler returning home drunk and sentimental, it drops in on the only time the character is able to tell his sleeping wife how he feels about her. And yet, Marie is no simple love song; Cutler’s regretful tone suggests an undercurrent of violence (“Sometimes I’m crazy, but I guess you know/I’m weak and I’m lazy and I’ve hurt you so”).

“He certainly loves her. It would seem that that isn’t drink, but it might be,” Newman said on Revisionist History, adding, “Is this a good guy? And my answer to that is, ‘I don’t know.’ I’m suspicious of this – I’m drunk right now, baby, but when I’m awake I might knock the shit out of you sometime.”

Birmingham initially appears to be more straightforward – a neat, airbrushed biography of Cutler and family, with a chorus that airily extols the virtues of the character’s hometown, “The greatest city in Alabam’” – until Cutler merrily introduces his pet, an attack dog, in the final verse, shattering the wholesome scenes (“Get him, Dan!”).

The concept: Johnny Cutler’s Birthday

The songs kept coming, and Newman began working on a concept album titled Johnny Cutler’s Birthday. Intended to cover a day in the life of the titular character, Newman’s 13-song piano-and-voice demos for the project, complete with scene-setting narration – recorded in February 1973 during a single session – were eventually released on the 2002 expanded reissue of Good Old Boys.

Newman’s vision was to follow Cutler from a park with his daughter, Suzy, to a trip to church (the fearful gospel of If We Didn’t Have Jesus) and on to his boozy birthday party (The Joke, Louisiana, My Daddy Knew Dixie Howell), followed by the morning after (Good Morning, sung by Marie), a run-in at the steel factory (Birmingham Redux), a conversation with a doctor about Cutler’s brother’s mental-health issues (Doctor, Doctor; Naked Man) and an evening indulging in the escapism of drinking and watching television (Albanian Anthem, Rolling).

The final album: A broader exploration of the South

From the demos alone, it’s clear that Johnny Cutler’s Birthday could have been a great concept album, but one of its songs, the stirring classic Louisiana – released on Good Old Boys as Louisiana 1927 – pushed Newman towards a broader exploration of the South. In an aside from Cutler’s birthday celebrations, Louisiana looks back to the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, when an area of 27,000 square miles was submerged in up to 30 feet of water. Thousands were made homeless and nearly 250 people died.

The federal government’s mishandling of the situation led to the election of left-wing populist politician Huey Long as governor of Louisiana. Newman was fascinated by Long – who was elected to the US Senate in 1932 and was assassinated on 8 September 1935 – and recorded a pair of songs that brought him into the album’s narrative: the original Kingfish, a fictional Long campaign speech set to music that veered between the triumphant and the sinister, and a bawdy cover of the Long campaign song Every Man A King, featuring members of Eagles.

The Long-centric tracks added an extra dimension to Good Old Boys’ rich and outspoken exploration of the Southern United States. And, despite the controversial nature of many of its lyrics, the album became Newman’s biggest-selling release to that point, reaching No.36 on the Billboard 200. What’s more, many of its tracks have remained classics – a reminder of Newman’s ability to craft universally loved songs with challenging subject matter. There would be many more of those to come.

Find out where Randy Neman ranks among the best songwriters in history.

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