1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 318. Randy Newman – Good Old Boys (1974)

 

We know broadly what to expect from Randy Newman – some blues/jazz/music hall pieces with witty and sardonic lyrics. And that’s what we get here, this time with a theme that’s broadly about the American South. 

The opening track, Rednecks, is a satirical piece told from the point of view of a Southern man, that not only skewers Southern racist policies, but also the hypocrisy of the North. Okay, says the narrator, we openly want to get rid of the Black people, but you in the North claim to be about equality yet look at all the poor Black neighbourhoods in your city. Beware: racially charged lyrics ahead! 

The Southern theme continues in a song about Birmingham (Alabama, not the one in the UK Midlands), and a track about the flood of Louisiana 1927 which feels worthy of The Band. 
Elsewhere, the songs are more about USA politics in general. Mr President (Have Pity On The Working Man) is yet another anti-Nixon song that sounds depressingly as relevant today. 

“Maybe you're cheatin' 
Maybe you're lyin'  
Maybe you have lost your mind  
Maybe you only think about yourself” 

On top of that are few more personal tracks. Marie is a simple love song, Guilty is a song about alcohol and drug abuse. Newman bounces through them all with a deceptive ease, each track is relatively short and self-contained, the better ones head towards a final line that encapsulates the entire song, like a good short story (“It takes a lot of medicine for me to pretend that I’m somebody else” at the end of Guilty, for example). 

It’s those lyrics and sentiment that stick with you, I think. Looking back after just having listened to the album, I can’t bring to mind a particular musical phrase from any song that I remember, rather a general Randy Newman-ness, but I can easily recall what the songs were about. Which is the reverse of what I usually get.