They’re Still Tryin’ to Wash Us Away
(An excellent read by Harmonica over on Identity Dixie. Well worth following the ‘See More’ links - DD)
“They are still trying to break us. They want us dead and replaced, and they make no bones about it…”
One of my favorite albums of the 1970s is Good Old Boys by Randy Newman. Though the album was originally planned as a full-on concept album, à la The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars or The Wall, about an everyman from the Deep South named John Cutler; eventually, the album became less ambitious, although the general Southern theme remained exploring the thoughts of several Southerners throughout its playtime. The album came out at a critical moment in the history of Dixie. Home Rule had been broken by literal bayonets, but Southerners remained a proud and defiant people. In this sense, Good Old Boys can be seen as part of the Southern cultural revival of the 1970s, the same movement that also produced Lynyrd Skynyrd and Smokey and the Bandit.
One of the best songs on the album is “Louisianna 1927” – a song about the devastating Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 that killed around 500 people and utterly destroyed large parts of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas, with cost estimates ranging upwards to $17.3 billion in 2023 dollars. The song’s narrator describes how the flood began when clouds from the North came in. He then laments what is happening to his land in the chorus…