“A Few Words in Defense of Our Country: The Biography of Randy Newman” by Robert Hilburn. Publisher: Hachette. 513 pages.
$34 On Sept. 2, 2005, just days after Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, killing 1,800 people and displacing tens of thousands more, the great American icon Aaron Neville and the R&B star India.Arie appeared together at a televised benefit concert and sang a yearning ballad with an anguished refrain: “Louisiana, Louisiana “They’re trying to wash us away.
“They’re trying to wash us away.” The performance was visceral and devastating. “Louisiana 1927,” a classic from Randy Newman’s album “Good Old Boys” (1974), could have easily been written any time in the past hundred years.
With Hurricane Katrina, history was repeating itself. In the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, poor people, White and Black, bore the brunt of a weather event so catastrophic that floodwater covered more than 25,000 square miles, as high as 30 feet. In Newman’s imagining of it, President Calvin Coolidge surveys the scene and bloodlessly opines to a lackey: “Isn’t it a shame what the river has done to this poor cracker’s land?” Or put another way, at a later date: “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.
” It’s a perfect American song. Newman occupies a peculiar space in our national life. He isn’t a household name, strictly speaking, but he is probably familiar to nearly every household by dint of his eclectic collection of novelty hits, f.
