Encore: Good Old Boys

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On my last trip to London, I had dinner at my favorite spot in Clerkenwell.

It's been in continuous operation for something like 150 years, which means it predates automobiles, radios, and the zipper.

I had the mangalitza loin chop and the potatoes confi.

Yum.

You need to go there.

Although, I don't know if I'm allowed to say the name.

Let's just say it starts with a Q, then a C,

and then an H.

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Pushkin.

This episode contains explicit language.

You want to tell a specific story.

You want to make an argument.

Make sense of a particularly powerful piece of tape.

But the simplest, and let's be honest, the most selfish reason, is that you want an excuse to hang out with someone you love.

And this was the origin of the Randy Newman episode.

I am one one of the very large group of music lovers who think that Randy Newman is a genius and that his best albums, like Sail Away or Good Old Boys, are basically as good as pop music ever gets.

So I tracked him down, actually through his son.

Thanks, Amos, booked a flight to Los Angeles, and on the plane ride asked myself, okay, of all the million things I could possibly talk to Randy Newman about, what would make for the best story?

And somewhere over, I'm sure, Nebraska, I realized, oh, it's obvious.

I need to talk to him about his song, Rednecks.

And so I did.

And if you're listening, Randy, and you want to have me over again, just say the word.

In the fall of 1974, the musician Randy Newman released an album called Good Old Boys.

The most beautiful song on the record is the third song on the first side.

Wait, can I prevail on you to just do a little bit of Marie?

Sure.

So I love that song so much.

Well, thank you very much.

Look like a princess,

night, and then.

With your hair, parlor by,

I will never forget.

My name is Malcolm Gladwell.

You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.

This episode is about Randy Newman's Good Old Boys, one of the most remarkable albums of its era.

I listened to it for the first time years ago.

But then I happened to listen to it again very recently and realized that Good Old Boys is not an album you can hear just once and hope to do it justice.

Because it's not just remarkable, it's unsettling.

I don't think an album like this could be made today.

And by the end of this episode, I suspect you'll agree with me.

I decided to go to California, sit down with Randy Newman, and create a listener's guide to one of the most perplexing works of music that I have ever encountered.

I'm drunk right now, baby.

But I've got to be.

I never could tell you

what you mean to me.

I loved you the first time.

I saw you.

And I always

love you and me.

Newman is in his 70s, still writing music.

Tall and slightly intimidating.

He's Hollywood royalty.

His uncle Alfred was a composer who was nominated for an Academy Award 44 times, won nine times.

Newman has had a second career writing for the movies as well, like You've Got a Friend in Me for Toy Story.

Newman is unusual among songwriters because he writes in character, and the narrator of Good Old Boys is a creation of Newman's.

He's called Johnny Cutler, a steelworker from Birmingham, Alabama, 30 years old.

The song Marie is about Johnny Cutler coming home late after a night out with the boys and gazing love struck at his sleeping wife.

I like the idea

very much about being

inarticulate without, that's not the right word, inarticulate, but being unable

to have the words unless you drink something.

You know, I can't say this to you, and maybe to lack the ability

to say those kind of words.

But he's the fact that he has been drinking and you realize he can only say what he's saying because he's drunk and because she's asleep.

Yeah,

right?

But that even makes me

humanizes him and even more.

I sort of feel so.

He certainly loves her.

I mean, it would seem

that that isn't drink, but it might be.

Is this a good guy?

And my answer to that is, I don't know.

I mean,

I'm suspicious of

this, oh, I'm drunk right now, baby.

But maybe when I'm awake, I might knock the shit out of you sometime.

Randy Newman wrote, Marie, he created Johnny Cutler.

He dreamt up a beautiful love song for him, but he doesn't know if he understands him or even if he likes him.

As if Johnny Cutler came from his imagination, but is now somehow independent of it.

It makes you wonder who's in charge of this song.

Sometimes I'm crazy,

but I guess you know

I'm weak and I'm lazy

and I hurt you so

and I never listen to a word you say

when you come to me in trouble, darling.

I just turn away,

but I love you,

and I loved you the first time

I saw you,

And I always will love

you, Marie.

The story behind Good Old Boys begins with a man named Lester Maddox.

Maddox was governor of Georgia from 1967 to 1971.

Now he's mostly forgotten, but in his day, he was notorious.

I think you're supposed to act for real.

I don't look at myself as one of the very smart people, so I try to act like Lester Maddox, like inside I feel and think and believe.

Maddox grew up in the Depression in Atlanta.

His father was an alcoholic.

My dad never made hardly any money.

At times we didn't even have a bathroom in the house.

We had four rooms and a path rather than four rooms and a bath.

And we didn't have electricity.

Maddox dropped out of high school.

got a job as a steel worker to help support his five younger siblings, married his childhood sweetheart, Virginia, and after the war, he started a diner near Georgia Tech.

The house specialty was skillet-fried chicken.

He called his place the Pickrick.

So I wanted a name no one else had.

And I came on the name upon the name Pickwick,

and I found out that really wick doesn't mean anything except what you know it to be, wick.

That's what Webster will even tell you that, Wick.

And someone had already used the name Pickwick in England.

So I couldn't use that.

So it was about 2 o'clock one morning.

I'd been working on it for weeks.

Maddox was one of those people who you can't do a cartoon version of because he already looks like a cartoon version of himself.

He's skinny, with an oversized head, bald dome, black plastic glasses, always in a black suit, moves with a kind of loose-limbed floppiness, like a clown.

There are so many oral history interviews with Lester Maddox floating around the state of Georgia that he must have spent as many hours reminiscing about his time as governor as he actually spent serving as governor.

The man liked to talk.

See, the picnics, if I city's lead, to pick out, to choose, to select, and rick means to pile up, to heap or to mass.

So I named my restaurant Pick Rick and said if you'd picnic it to Pick Rick and pick it out, we would Rick it up.

And we did, and that's why it was named Pick Rick.

I've never heard anything else being named Pick Rick.

Maddox advertised the Pick Rick in the Saturday edition of the Atlanta Journal in a column with the title, Pick Rick Says.

Lots of one-liners and Maddoxisms, like the 1950s version of tweets.

I talked about Christmas, I talked about marriage,

I talked about the monkey house at Grant Park, I talked about weather, I talked about fishing, and my ads.

But soon his column, Pick Rick Says, becomes more and more political.

Because this is Atlanta.

in the mid-1950s, one of the birthplaces of the civil rights movement.

And Pickrick is a 10-minute drive from Avenue, where Martin Luther King and Andrew Young and Vernon Jordan and everyone else are starting to stir things up.

And Lester Maddox is not at all happy with that.

He's a segregationist.

And the more strident Maddox gets in his weekly ads, the more popular Pick Rick says becomes.

People start buying the Atlanta Journal on Saturday just to read what Maddox is up to.

Maddox decides to run for mayor of Atlanta.

He has no organization, no money.

He drives himself around.

And he loses, but the race is closer than you'd think.

So he runs again and loses, and runs a third time and loses.

But then the wave of desegregation protests hits Atlanta in the early 1960s.

The public schools are integrated first, then the lunch counters, then the restaurants.

And since the Pick Rick restaurant does not admit black people, the civil rights protesters come knocking.

Well, the first time I was about

four whites and three blacks came in.

And Virginia and I were about to eat our luncheon Saturday afternoon.

They told me what they were going to do, and I told them, you're not going to do any such things.

What they were going to do was eat a pickrick with a television cameras as witness.

I said, you've never been here before.

You just want to fuss and fight.

So I grabbed two of them.

I think one of them was John Lewis or Brown or somebody.

And I just about had them out the door when they happened to remember they're supposed to lay down on the floor.

If you hadn't thought about that, I'd had them both out.

And

they got on the floor because I couldn't drag them, so I called my black employees out of the kitchen.

And I said, These people are trying to destroy our business.

They don't want to eat with us, they just want to create a problem.

They got the television and radio and everyone with them.

And I said, I'm going to give you $10 for each one of them you throw out

in the next 30 seconds.

Maddox's employees threw them out, but the protesters came back.

This time, Maddox met them at the door with the television cameras rolling and a crowd starting to gather.

I don't own this property.

What is the poor thing, Mr.

Maddox?

What is the poor?

There's Maddox in front of the pick rick with his black suit and bald head.

Protesters shouting, cameras all around.

He's in heaven.

I'll use axe channels.

I'll use guns.

I'll use paint.

I'll use my fists.

I'll use my customers.

I'll use my employees, I'll use anything at my disposal.

This property belongs to me, my wife, and my children.

It doesn't belong to anybody else.

I'll throw out a white one, or a black one, or a red-headed one, or a bald-headed one.

It doesn't make any difference.

Maddox gets called into court because the Civil Rights Act has been passed and what he's doing is illegal.

He's given a choice, integrate or shut his doors.

And he decides to shut the pick rick.

One of the most popular and successful restaurants in Atlanta, the business that he has spent his lifetime building, that made him famous.

And to every southerner angry at the way the world is turning, he becomes a hero.

A friend says to him, you know, maybe you should run for governor.

And Maddox says, okay.

And in 1966, he wins.

A white nationalist in the hospitality business who came to public attention writing pithy politically charged statements in a widely read media forum runs against the political establishment, and pulls off an upset victory.

And by the way, it's a very close race.

Maddox doesn't actually get as many votes as his opponent, but he wins when the election is thrown to the legislature.

Oh, and a huge part of Maddox's rhetoric is how the media can't be trusted.

He's constantly accusing newspapers of lying about him.

In fact, in the corner of his official governor's portrait, there's a little table with a dead fish on it, wrapped in a copy of the Atlanta Journal.

A white nationalist in the hospitality business who wrote pithy statements on a media platform, runs against the political establishment, accuses the news media of running fake news about him, doesn't get as many votes as his opponent, and nonetheless takes over the highest executive office.

I mean, when has that ever happened?

Maddox serves four years, has to step down because of term limits.

Jimmy Carter takes over as governor of Georgia, as the state, you might say, returns to its senses.

And Maddox consoles himself with running for and winning the job of lieutenant governor.

He is well on his way to obscurity.

And then he gets a call from New York, from the Dick Cavett Show, the great late-night talk show of the 1970s.

They want him as a guest.

That's when we return.

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In America, you get food deep.

Won't have to run through the jungle and scuff up your feet.

The first Randy Newman song I ever heard was Sail Away.

You just sing about Jesus and drink wine all day.

It's great to be an American.

Sail Away is the title track of the album Randy Newman made right before he wrote Good Old Boys.

I was a kid when I first heard it.

And I had the same experience I would later have with Newman's other songs.

I didn't get it at first.

I'm not sure I even paid attention to the words.

I just loved how grand it was.

Ain't no lion, a tiger, ain't no mama snake.

Just a sweet watermelon in the buckwheat cake.

Everybody is as happy as a man can be.

Climb a boy, little wall, play the way with

But then I got a little older and as I heard sail away I said wait a minute everybody is as happy as a man can be climb aboard little wog sail away with me wog really offensive British colonial slang for someone who's not white It's the n-word basically I noticed some interesting story behind Sail Away, the song.

Oh, it was uh

a guy was gonna make a movie and he was going to give 10 minutes to five or six pop people, Van Morrison, I remember, and Hendrix,

to do 10-minute thing.

And I came up with this thing.

It had a sort of a sea shanty before it, you know, very Irish kind of yo-ho, you know, there.

And then

this guy be standing in a clearing

in the jungle and singing this song.

And that was what I was going to do with my 10 10 minutes.

Randy Newman wrote a song about an American slave trader standing somewhere in West Africa, giving his sales pitch to potential recruits.

Come to America.

You're going to love this little cotton plantation that I've lined up for you.

Ain't no lion or tiger, ain't no mom or snake.

Just a sweet watermelon in the book we get, you know.

It's a nose laugh.

Yeah.

The character is so kind of outrageous,

but we're not laughing along with him.

We're horrified by him.

I mean, it's...

Yeah, but people laugh at that in a nervous way at the watermelon joke and

sit around, think about Jesus, drink wine all day.

Now, there's a way to do that song so that it's not so shocking.

Like the cover version done later the same year by Bobby Darren, who was one of the biggest pop stars of the 1960s.

Bobby Darren is happy.

Yeah.

Come to America, Little One.

You know, they got rid of the Wog.

Oh my God.

But

that's like blasphemy.

Climb aboard Little One and sail away with me.

In Bobby Darren's version, the line, Climb aboard little wog, sail away with me, which is crucial in establishing how vile the narrator is, becomes climb aboard, little one, sail away with me.

I'm sorry, I can't get I can't get past this so quickly.

That's unbelievable.

That he did a happy version?

Yes.

It's this it isn't.

I mean, there's there it is.

The thing is, Newman liked Bobby Darren.

He knew him, and he didn't know what to think.

I mean, there is a world of difference between wog and one.

Also, if I'm not mistaken, Bobby Darren substitutes the words mamba snake with mama snake.

Ain't no lions and tigers and no nurturing mama snake.

You know, he was, oh, I'll do it.

I'd like to do that.

And it's like, come to America, you know.

But this is this, this song is like a snake.

He's not a dumb guy, you know.

This song is like a, it is a wallop.

It is emotional wallop.

It is a searing song about

the darkest moment in America's past.

It's a jaw drop.

It's like springtime for Hitler in a way.

Little one.

Come away with me.

You know, it just was so right.

His chovious instincts couldn't

restrain himself.

How did you feel when you first heard that version?

I felt, you know, oh my Jesus Christ,

and that was it.

The original intention of Sail Away was to make the listener uncomfortable.

Newman takes a familiar figure, a salesman, an entrepreneur, a patriot, and gives him a rollicking sea shanty.

But then he forces you to acknowledge that underneath all that, there lurks a monster.

Bobby Darren chickened out.

He couldn't do it.

He didn't want us to be uncomfortable, and so Wog became one, and Sail Away became a glorified nursery rhyme.

I don't mean to single Bobby Darren out, because I think that most of us take the easy path in these situations too.

But the particular genius of Randy Newman is that he won't do that.

He can't.

The Dick Cabot Show!

So, it's 1970.

Lester Maddox gets a call from Dick Cabot.

Come on our show.

He flies to New York.

And who tunes in that night?

Randy Newman.

Ladies and gentlemen,

Dick Cabot.

Dick Cavett is a year into his legendary late-night show on ABC, up against Johnny Carson's tonight show.

Cavott's show was like a highlight reel of the 1970s.

He did the greatest ever interview with Jimi Hendrix.

Groucho Marks was a regular.

So was Muhammad Ali.

He once had Salvador Dalli on the same show as the legendary pitching great Satchel Page.

The famous debate between Gourvadal and Norman Mailer?

That was on Dick Cavett.

Listen, we have a very good show tonight, and I want to move right into it.

An excellent show.

I think, I don't know.

How do I know?

I haven't seen it.

It might be a big dud, for all I know.

Cat eyeglasses, hair in a bun, who brings a box full of cockroaches to the

What can we do about them?

What can we learn about them?

Are they our friends?

No, they're not exactly our friends, but they are certainly our companions in all our.

All our doings.

And I'm rather fond of them.

They have a distinguished lineage.

How many of us could meet our ancestors of 300 million years ago and recognize them?

The cockroaches can.

They go back that far?

They go back that far.

That's older than the dinosaurs.

Twice as old as the dinosaurs.

All the way back to the coal age.

They were already recognizably cockroaches.

It's always the people you don't like who are the last to leave, isn't it?

They'll be here long after we have quitted this earth, I'm sure.

Kevin does a good 10 minutes on cockroaches.

Are these your cockroaches or some of ours?

The cockroach lady finally leaves the stage.

And then.

My next guest tonight is Governor Lester Maddox.

How comes Maddox, the gleaming bald head, the black suit.

Governor Maddox,

I still call you Governor, don't I?

Call me most anything you want to, everybody else does.

Kip yourself, Dick.

Have you ever followed Bugs before?

Yes, a few moments ago on your program, sir.

That's the only time.

That's the only time?

God, I love Dick Cavett.

They shake hands.

They take their seats, rust-colored swivel loungers atop a gray shag carpet.

Cavott shows the audience a photograph of Maddox holding his axe handle outside the Pick pickrick restaurant.

And Maddox then corrects him and says, no, it's not an axe handle, it's a pick handle, and goes off on one of his long, endless digressions about the meaning of the pickrick.

The pick denotes hard work, and we had in the restaurant some of these pick handles, two kegs of them by a big old fireplace where we burned hickory wood.

There were six of them in each of the kegs, and they were dark red because that was the uh

it looked something similar to a chicken leg a pick handle does.

Not like the axe handle that the news media talks about.

And Cavitt, who must be wondering, what on earth, simply says.

Well, I've certainly learned a lot.

Cavot brings on his next guest, the football player Jim Brown, then one of the most famous professional black athletes in the country.

Brown settles down next to Maddox, who is literally half his size, and gives him a polite smile.

And Cavot says to the two of them, Do you feel separate but equal?

I realize that's 1960s civil rights humor, but I still think it's hilarious.

Maddox turns to Brown and says, I thought you was the singer.

He thought Jim Brown was James Brown.

He then volunteers his personal definition of what being a segregationist really means.

A segregationist is a person that loves his race enough or other races enough, has enough of racial pride and integrity to want to preserve them.

And I think a racist is one that doesn't care enough for his race or another race to where they would, don't care whether they're amalgamated or destroyed or not.

Amalgamated?

Good lord.

Now think about this for a moment.

Maddox is no longer governor.

Georgia has come to its senses and elected nice, safe, modern, non-racist Jimmy Carter.

Maddox is a footnote.

So what point is there in having him on a mainstream talk show like Dick Cavett?

The magazine where I work, The New Yorker, had a case like this recently.

Donald Trump's Bengali Steve Bannon was invited to speak at the magazine's annual literary festival, and everyone flipped out.

The New Yorker's writers took to Twitter.

A bunch of high-profile celebrity invitees to the festival dropped out.

And the argument that was made about Bannon is an argument that could as easily have been applied to Maddox years ago.

What's the point of giving someone like that a platform?

I mean, what could possibly be learned from listening to them talk?

And sure enough, what happens over the course of the next hour of the Dick Cavit show?

Exactly what you would think.

I think what we're really talking about in this country is economic development of black people.

At one point, Jim Brown says something thoughtful and reasonable, that he thinks the priority for black people ought to be economic development.

And Maddox jumps on him.

Economic development with all people.

What we're talking about, I don't know.

How come you have black people?

How come you don't want to do it for black people?

How come you don't want want to do it for white people?

I'll tell you why.

How come you don't do it for everybody?

How come you're always black people?

You're talking about all people.

Can I give you an answer?

I think we understand the question.

Can I give you an answer?

Do you mind?

Go ahead.

If you're ready, I'll give you time.

Okay, Governor.

What I'm really saying is that there are some people that have suffered in this country, poor people generally, but let's say that we have various ethnic groups in this country that have attained a certain kind of equality.

Black people are more or less, along with the Indians,

on the last rung of the ladder.

Can I I finish, Governor?

Can I finish?

Okay, do you mind?

Now, what I'm really saying is that I feel that the way to bring about equality of black people in the system is to bring it back.

What about equality of white people?

Now, I'm going to interrupt you every time you keep calling black people.

What about equality of all people?

If you interrupt me, Governor, I can't talk to you.

Then Maddox starts going on and on about all the things he's done for black people in the state of Georgia.

And Jim Brown turns to him with genuine curiosity and asks if he's had any blowback from white bigots.

From the bigots in the South?

Have any problems with us?

From the white bigots because you did so much for the black man.

Which is kind of a great question.

Because if Maddox has, in fact, been this great friend of black people, then you'd think he would have angered all the hardcore segregationists and everyone else who was opposed to the civil rights movement.

Right?

Mr.

Brown asked you, Governor Maddox, if you'd had any trouble from your white admirers for the fact that you have them.

I didn't say admirers, sir.

No, he said bigots.

Well, why didn't you say it like he said?

You have bigots.

Why didn't you say it?

Now, see that what I'm talking about, Dick?

I do see it.

You take words and push them around, and you mislead the people in the audience.

No, you ought to start being honest, all of you, with your words and what you're saying to people.

You said admirers, and he said bigots.

A lot of difference, isn't it?

The last half of the show is just Maddox getting more and more agitated, Dick Cavott trying to calm him down, and Jim Brown looking over at Maddox like he's a misbehaving child.

Maddox asks Cavitt to apologize.

Cavott refuses.

The audience makes astonished noises.

Maddox stands up and starts to walk off the stage.

Cavott says, come on, sit down.

Maddox says, I'll sit down when you apologize.

So Cavitt says, If I called any of your admirers bigots, who are not bigots, I apologize.

This is insane.

What was Dick Cavett thinking inviting this guy in his show?

Why don't you apologize to people, Georgia, those friends of mine, for calling them bigots?

I think I may.

Either you do it, I'm going to leave now.

Wait a minute.

Wait a minute.

Please don't leave.

I'd like to speak with Georgia.

And he owes them an apology, too.

The only bigots that I'm...

Wait, wait, no, wait, no, wait.

Maddox gives Cavot an ultimatum.

One minute to take it back, or he'll walk out for good.

At which point, Jim Brown pipes up.

Wait, what about me?

How much time do I have?

It's a circus.

I would say that I phrased the question in a way that was not exactly accurate in the sense that he did say bigots.

Have any white bigots been upset because you have done certain things for the people?

He came back and said, my admirers, and you haven't apologized yet, and you got 15 seconds.

All right, now let me use those 15 seconds.

I apologize for suggesting that a bigot would be the way of characterizing all of your admirers.

Wait a minute, wait a minute.

There's more time.

And Lester Maddox storms off to set.

Oh, oh, and I haven't even mentioned that the writer Truman Capote then shows up.

He's then at the height of his celebrity, tiny, fastidious, wearing purple-tinted round sunglasses.

You know, curiously enough, I had a cousin who lived in Atlanta that I once went to visit and who took me to this restaurant that he ran that was called Picarib or something like that.

that.

And,

you know, well, it was, called Picarab, Nicaragu, something here.

And he was always at the door with guns, you know, to keep

any sort of Negroes out of the restaurant.

But I went there with this cousin of mine because it was near the campus, the college campus.

And it wasn't bad, but it wasn't finger-licking good.

The whole thing is so bananas that Cabot feels a need to apologize to his audience.

I asked him if he would please come back and use the last minutes to say whatever he would like to say because

he felt that I guess that he was insulted.

I did not mean to insult him at that moment.

I have to say this, and I hope I don't feel it doesn't come off sounding

I don't know what, but I I found him in spite of the fact that I would probably despise his feelings about

segregation if I were actually clear on what they are,

a likable man.

Would anyone go along with this?

Would you agree?

The audience is not having it.

Why is there?

What?

I'm back down, man.

I'm not backing down.

Shut up.

I'll tell you when I'm backing down.

We'll be back after this.

It was a farce.

What was the point?

Except to allow a segregationist to play the victim.

What good is there in giving someone like that a platform?

Except Randy Newman was watching.

Whose imagination has a mind of its own.

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eBay, things

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love.

So were you a regular Dick Cabot watcher in those years?

Not that I recall.

I was

uh

but I would watch, you know, if I was up, I'd watch it.

Yeah.

And I think I was usually up in those days.

And stereotypically you are the Dick Cabot audience, right?

I am, yeah.

It seemed like half an hour, you know, where they were just yelling and yelling and yelling.

He was, yeah.

He was so alien that I felt sorry for him.

He didn't dismiss that whole exchange or shrug or change the channel.

He reacted to it.

He imagines what a supporter of Lester Maddox would think watching Lester Maddox storm off the stage.

Now Dick,

I'm going to give you one minute to apologize and be for you called Dick and Sen George.

I'm going to leave your show.

Now you do whatever you want to about.

He gives that imaginary supporter a name.

Johnny Cutler, a home, Birmingham, Alabama, a job, steel worker.

He imagines Johnny Cutler coming home one night, drunk, gazing at his sleeping wife.

And then he imagines him turning on the television.

Last night I saw Lester Maddox on a TV show

with some smart-ass New York Jew.

And the Jew laughed at Lester Maddox.

And the audience laughed at Lester-Maddocks too.

Well, it may be.

on it too.

So, small ass New York, too.

That's good.

The audience laughs at Lister Maddox 2.

That's pretty good.

Yeah, that really is going to click a, click a, click a.

That became the first song on Good Old Boys.

It's called Rednecks.

When I first heard that, I didn't know Lister Maddox was.

Yeah.

I didn't even know that it was.

But that idea of the southerner going to New York and sitting down.

And thinking get cavity is Jewish, too.

It's fantastic.

Will he maybe a fool, but he's a fool.

And if they think they're better than him, they're wrong.

So when I came to this park, I took some.

You want to sing along, don't you?

It's like Sail Away all over again.

This is where I made this song.

But then comes this.

We talk real funny down here.

We drank too much and we laughed too loud.

We're too dumb to make it in no northern town.

We're keeping near us down.

It's 1970.

The South is in upheaval.

Lester Maddox has just been humiliated by some smart-ass New York Jew.

What do you think Johnny Cutler's gonna say?

College men out of LSU.

When in dumb, come out dumb too.

Hustling round Atlanta in the alligator shoes.

Getting drunk every weekend at the barbecues.

And keeping the negress down.

How did people respond to that song at the time?

I played it in Lafayette,

Louisiana, and they loved it.

I got a letter, the only one I ever got, on this song,

from somebody.

And he said, dear sir,

I was in the audience in Lafayette when you played this song.

He's a black kid.

And he said,

I don't know where you're coming from, but there I was, and I was enjoying the concert up to then.

And all of a sudden, I'm sitting in the middle of 1,500 white

guys

yelling rednecks with rednecks, you know.

and he said it made him very uncomfortable and he wanted to let me know we're red next we're red next

and we don't know our ass from a hole in the ground we're red next southern audiences started yelling for it so they could sing along with the chorus did it become was it taken over by

didn't become a kind of southern anthem for a certain kind of or did when i thought that that was happening, I stopped playing it, you know,

in the south.

He had to stop singing it.

Many radio stations wouldn't play it.

And you definitely wouldn't hear that song on the radio today.

It even feels strange to play it here.

We've become, appropriately, uncomfortable with the N-word in almost any context.

You can only play Rednecks now if you explain where it came from and who Johnny Cutler was.

But you can't not play it just because it makes you feel uncomfortable.

Because Johnny Cutler in Birmingham, Alabama in 1970 absolutely wanted to keep the niggers down.

And we can't gloss over that fact if we're being honest.

Oh, and by the way, Johnny Cutler wasn't done.

Down here we too ignorant to realize

that the North is set to neglect free.

He then names every slum in every northern city.

Putting a cage in Harlem

He says to all those smug northerners, when you drive with your windows up and your doors locked through the projects of your own inner cities,

are you still sure you're better than me?

You have to play that too.

Because if you're going to be honest about who Lester Maddox really was, you have to be honest about his critics too.

Did you ever hear from Lester Maddox?

He sent me an axe.

He didn't, really?

Yeah.

Oh, that's fantastic.

From his store.

He sold axe handles.

Yeah.

Yeah, pick handles, as he would tell.

Lester Maddox listened to a song about racial hatred, and he sent the man who wrote it a pick handle as a token of his gratitude.

Revisionist History is produced by Mia LaBelle and Jacob Smith with Camille Baptista.

Our editor is Julia Barton.

Flon Williams is our engineer.

Fact-checking by Beth Johnson.

Original music by Luis Guerra.

Special thanks to Carly Migliore, Heather Fane, Maggie Taylor, Maya Koenig, and Jacob Weisberg.

Revisionist History is brought to you by Pushkin Industries.

I'm Malcolm Gladbow.

By the way, there's a great essay on this subject in the 2014 book, Let the Devil Speak by Stephen Hart.

Hart writes that in Sail Away, Randy Newman showed one of America's greatest lies being crafted.

In his next album, Newman would show how the lie soaked into America's bones.

Come aboard Little One and say, Sail Away.

Daddy, what you can't.

I think this is sort of happy.

I mean, certainly the voices make it that way.

You can't do it.

Yeah, it's lost all of its...

I like that buck we cake.

Like it's some kind of delicacy you're getting at this artisanal bakery.

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