The best part of this song is Newman’s redneck narrator describing Dick Cavett, WASP from Nebraska, as a “smart-ass, New York Jew.”
There are layers and layers to unpack in that clever nod to Southern attitudes on the national media in the 1970s. The entire album is an excellent satire of the cultural baggage that made Nixon’s Southern Strategy so successful. The palpable anger that fueled George Wallace, massive resistance, and conservative backlash. Then again, that the album and the foibles it highlighted were embraced by progressive Southerners does speak to change in the region that decade — Newman premiered the thing with the Atlanta symphony in 1974. Journalist Steven Hart has a nice essay on the conceptualization of the album in his volume LET THE DEVIL SPEAK.
“Louisiana, 1927” is remarkably powerful in the right circumstances. Ten years after Katrina, the tune has been re-purposed as a de facto anthem for the tangled cultural responses to the Hurricane — “Six feet of water in the streets of Plaquemine.” One of those resilient cultural artifacts written about one thing but spontaneously and successfully embraced as the ideal distillation of another. Like the Buffalo Springfield song “For What It’s Worth,” penned three or four years before the Kent State shootings but now forever linked to the incident by subsequent cultural memory.
Still think the most compelling things on that album are “Mr. President, Have Pity on the Working Man” and the three Huey Long songs. Back in college I seriously toyed with applying to direct Robert Penn Warren’s stage adaptation of ALL THE KING’s MEN in an experimental black box theater using this album as a musical base. There’s such a quiet menace to “Kingfish.”
Hailing from Alabama, I find a certain poignancy in the track “Birmingham.” The juxtaposition of backyard trees and submerged violence (“Get ’em, Dan!” referring to “Bull” Connor). Though I lived two hours away, my hometown was in the Birmingham media market, so we used to get news and ads for Jefferson County elections. I recall one of the candidates in the contentious 1999 Birmingham mayoral race (maybe William Bell?) briefly sampled the chorus in commercials. I wonder if whoever on his campaign licensed the song had ever listened to the thing the whole way through.
The Cherokee County mentioned in the wedding song on the album is just north of where I grew up. Site of the terrible Palm Sunday tornado that made national news twenty years ago for flattening a church during a service, killing twenty parishioners.
The county seat is named Centre; the locals joke the town’s unofficial motto is “Far From the.”
You can tell I come from the Southern narrative tradition Newman himself channels — I ramble and meander.
August 27th, 2015 at 11:30AM
The best part of this song is Newman’s redneck narrator describing Dick Cavett, WASP from Nebraska, as a “smart-ass, New York Jew.”
There are layers and layers to unpack in that clever nod to Southern attitudes on the national media in the 1970s. The entire album is an excellent satire of the cultural baggage that made Nixon’s Southern Strategy so successful. The palpable anger that fueled George Wallace, massive resistance, and conservative backlash. Then again, that the album and the foibles it highlighted were embraced by progressive Southerners does speak to change in the region that decade — Newman premiered the thing with the Atlanta symphony in 1974. Journalist Steven Hart has a nice essay on the conceptualization of the album in his volume LET THE DEVIL SPEAK.
“Louisiana, 1927” is remarkably powerful in the right circumstances. Ten years after Katrina, the tune has been re-purposed as a de facto anthem for the tangled cultural responses to the Hurricane — “Six feet of water in the streets of Plaquemine.” One of those resilient cultural artifacts written about one thing but spontaneously and successfully embraced as the ideal distillation of another. Like the Buffalo Springfield song “For What It’s Worth,” penned three or four years before the Kent State shootings but now forever linked to the incident by subsequent cultural memory.
Still think the most compelling things on that album are “Mr. President, Have Pity on the Working Man” and the three Huey Long songs. Back in college I seriously toyed with applying to direct Robert Penn Warren’s stage adaptation of ALL THE KING’s MEN in an experimental black box theater using this album as a musical base. There’s such a quiet menace to “Kingfish.”
Hailing from Alabama, I find a certain poignancy in the track “Birmingham.” The juxtaposition of backyard trees and submerged violence (“Get ’em, Dan!” referring to “Bull” Connor). Though I lived two hours away, my hometown was in the Birmingham media market, so we used to get news and ads for Jefferson County elections. I recall one of the candidates in the contentious 1999 Birmingham mayoral race (maybe William Bell?) briefly sampled the chorus in commercials. I wonder if whoever on his campaign licensed the song had ever listened to the thing the whole way through.
The Cherokee County mentioned in the wedding song on the album is just north of where I grew up. Site of the terrible Palm Sunday tornado that made national news twenty years ago for flattening a church during a service, killing twenty parishioners.
The county seat is named Centre; the locals joke the town’s unofficial motto is “Far From the.”
You can tell I come from the Southern narrative tradition Newman himself channels — I ramble and meander.
August 27th, 2015 at 1:47PM
Thanks for this, Crimson05er. I’ve always loved this album, and now I love it even more.