Good Old Boys, Randy Newman's masterpiece

In 2002 Rhino Records put out a newly re-mastered version of Randy Newman's 1974 Good Old Boys album. This now two disc package just got listed the Blogcritics site as one of the best re-issues of the year.

Newman made Good Old Boys as something of a mixed-feelings Valentine to the south. "Rednecks" begins the album on just that mixed note. He wrote a good stompin' barroom sing-along song, quite convincing for a well-bred Jew from a family of film composers. Even though they might theoretically sympathize with the lyrical sentiment, however, it seems unlikely that a bunch of rednecks in a bar would sing along to

We talk real funny down here
We drink too much and we laugh too loud
We're too dumb to make it in no Northern town
And we're keepin' the niggers down

Then it turns into in fact something of a defense of the southerners against liberal northern racial hypocrisy, with a bridge throwing back the northern ghettos where the black man is "free to be kept in a cage."

He manages to get at southern pride, heritage and dysfunction in all kinds of more obvious and more subtle ways, without much in the way of obvious southern musical styles. "Rednecks" might be considered country music. The bonus disc has a nice discarded gospel song from the original sessions, "If We Didn't Have Jesus." Other than that, the most obvious model of southern music seems to be Stephen Foster, especially on the sentimental "Birmingham" - which still manages to have a slight undertone of menace ["Get 'em Dan"].

Struggling against harsh fate, "Louisiana" makes beautiful use of slow rising waves of strings describing the rising waters of a terrible flood from 1927. He never wrote a more beautiful song, and none with a greater sense of helpless dread. This track was used very effectively at the close of the outstanding and underrated Paul Newman movie Blaze, about the brother of the legendary Huey Long.

Article Author: Al Barger

Unreformed hawkish Hoosier hillbilly Al Barger runs the still squeezin' down the psychodelic Kentucky moonshine at More Things. What with the paranoid religious visions, the Pentecostal music, visions of God and anarchy running amok and such, somebody …

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