Encore: Good Old Boys

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.

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Speaker 26 With online programs that fit around deployments, training, and unpredictable schedules, AMU makes it possible to earn your degree no matter where duty takes you.

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Speaker 35 Learn more at amu.apus.edu/slash military to learn more. That's amu.apus.edu slash military.

Speaker 10 On my last trip to London, I had dinner at my favorite spot in Clerkenwell.

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Speaker 45 Pushkin.

Speaker 1 This episode contains explicit language.

Speaker 33 You want to tell a specific story.

Speaker 48 You want to make an argument.

Speaker 47 Make sense of a particularly powerful piece of tape.

Speaker 24 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.

Speaker 21 And this was the origin of the Randy Newman episode.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 36 So I tracked him down, actually through his son.

Speaker 23 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?

Speaker 10 And somewhere over, I'm sure, Nebraska, I realized, oh, it's obvious.

Speaker 33 I need to talk to him about his song, Rednecks.

Speaker 22 And so I did.

Speaker 52 And if you're listening, Randy, and you want to have me over again, just say the word.

Speaker 54 In the fall of 1974, the musician Randy Newman released an album called Good Old Boys.

Speaker 47 The most beautiful song on the record is the third song on the first side.

Speaker 56 Wait, can I prevail on you to just do a little bit of Marie? Sure.

Speaker 55 So I love that song so much.

Speaker 57 Well, thank you very much.

Speaker 58 Look like a princess,

Speaker 58 night, and then.

Speaker 57 With your hair, parlor by,

Speaker 57 I will never forget.

Speaker 50 My name is Malcolm Gladwell.

Speaker 38 You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.

Speaker 54 This episode is about Randy Newman's Good Old Boys, one of the most remarkable albums of its era.

Speaker 38 I listened to it for the first time years ago.

Speaker 59 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.

Speaker 47 Because it's not just remarkable, it's unsettling.

Speaker 40 I don't think an album like this could be made today.

Speaker 38 And by the end of this episode, I suspect you'll agree with me.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 57 I'm drunk right now, baby.

Speaker 63 But I've got to be.

Speaker 58 I never could tell you

Speaker 58 what you mean to me.

Speaker 58 I loved you the first time.

Speaker 57 I saw you.

Speaker 57 And I always

Speaker 57 love you and me.

Speaker 64 Newman is in his 70s, still writing music.

Speaker 40 Tall and slightly intimidating.

Speaker 64 He's Hollywood royalty.

Speaker 56 His uncle Alfred was a composer who was nominated for an Academy Award 44 times, won nine times.

Speaker 41 Newman has had a second career writing for the movies as well, like You've Got a Friend in Me for Toy Story.

Speaker 64 Newman is unusual among songwriters because he writes in character, and the narrator of Good Old Boys is a creation of Newman's.

Speaker 23 He's called Johnny Cutler, a steelworker from Birmingham, Alabama, 30 years old.

Speaker 59 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.

Speaker 63 I like the idea

Speaker 63 very much about being

Speaker 63 inarticulate without, that's not the right word, inarticulate, but being unable

Speaker 63 to have the words unless you drink something. You know, I can't say this to you, and maybe to lack the ability

Speaker 63 to say those kind of words.

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 63 Yeah,

Speaker 45 right?

Speaker 38 But that even makes me

Speaker 38 humanizes him and even more.

Speaker 51 I sort of feel so.

Speaker 63 He certainly loves her. I mean, it would seem

Speaker 63 that that isn't drink, but it might be.

Speaker 63 Is this a good guy?

Speaker 63 And my answer to that is, I don't know. I mean,

Speaker 63 I'm suspicious of

Speaker 63 this, oh, I'm drunk right now, baby. But maybe when I'm awake, I might knock the shit out of you sometime.

Speaker 50 Randy Newman wrote, Marie, he created Johnny Cutler.

Speaker 31 He dreamt up a beautiful love song for him, but he doesn't know if he understands him or even if he likes him.

Speaker 66 As if Johnny Cutler came from his imagination, but is now somehow independent of it.

Speaker 12 It makes you wonder who's in charge of this song.

Speaker 57 Sometimes I'm crazy,

Speaker 57 but I guess you know

Speaker 57 I'm weak and I'm lazy

Speaker 57 and I hurt you so

Speaker 57 and I never listen to a word you say

Speaker 57 when you come to me in trouble, darling. I just turn away,

Speaker 57 but I love you,

Speaker 70 and I loved you the first time

Speaker 58 I saw you,

Speaker 57 And I always will love

Speaker 57 you, Marie.

Speaker 64 The story behind Good Old Boys begins with a man named Lester Maddox.

Speaker 38 Maddox was governor of Georgia from 1967 to 1971.

Speaker 49 Now he's mostly forgotten, but in his day, he was notorious.

Speaker 71 I think you're supposed to act for real.

Speaker 71 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.

Speaker 10 Maddox grew up in the Depression in Atlanta.

Speaker 30 His father was an alcoholic.

Speaker 71 My dad never made hardly any money.

Speaker 71 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.

Speaker 23 Maddox dropped out of high school.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 51 The house specialty was skillet-fried chicken.

Speaker 55 He called his place the Pickrick.

Speaker 71 So I wanted a name no one else had. And I came on the name upon the name Pickwick,

Speaker 71 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.

Speaker 71 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.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 64 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.

Speaker 46 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.

Speaker 44 The man liked to talk.

Speaker 71 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.

Speaker 71 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.

Speaker 71 And we did, and that's why it was named Pick Rick. I've never heard anything else being named Pick Rick.

Speaker 54 Maddox advertised the Pick Rick in the Saturday edition of the Atlanta Journal in a column with the title, Pick Rick Says.

Speaker 11 Lots of one-liners and Maddoxisms, like the 1950s version of tweets.

Speaker 71 I talked about Christmas, I talked about marriage,

Speaker 71 I talked about the monkey house at Grant Park, I talked about weather, I talked about fishing, and my ads.

Speaker 38 But soon his column, Pick Rick Says, becomes more and more political.

Speaker 60 Because this is Atlanta.

Speaker 38 in the mid-1950s, one of the birthplaces of the civil rights movement.

Speaker 52 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.

Speaker 21 And Lester Maddox is not at all happy with that.

Speaker 16 He's a segregationist.

Speaker 64 And the more strident Maddox gets in his weekly ads, the more popular Pick Rick says becomes.

Speaker 66 People start buying the Atlanta Journal on Saturday just to read what Maddox is up to.

Speaker 47 Maddox decides to run for mayor of Atlanta.

Speaker 31 He has no organization, no money.

Speaker 38 He drives himself around.

Speaker 60 And he loses, but the race is closer than you'd think.

Speaker 64 So he runs again and loses, and runs a third time and loses.

Speaker 21 But then the wave of desegregation protests hits Atlanta in the early 1960s.

Speaker 59 The public schools are integrated first, then the lunch counters, then the restaurants.

Speaker 41 And since the Pick Rick restaurant does not admit black people, the civil rights protesters come knocking.

Speaker 71 Well, the first time I was about

Speaker 71 four whites and three blacks came in.

Speaker 71 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.

Speaker 66 What they were going to do was eat a pickrick with a television cameras as witness.

Speaker 71 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.

Speaker 71 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.

Speaker 71 And

Speaker 71 they got on the floor because I couldn't drag them, so I called my black employees out of the kitchen.

Speaker 71 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.

Speaker 71 And I said, I'm going to give you $10 for each one of them you throw out

Speaker 71 in the next 30 seconds.

Speaker 47 Maddox's employees threw them out, but the protesters came back.

Speaker 38 This time, Maddox met them at the door with the television cameras rolling and a crowd starting to gather.

Speaker 74 I don't own this property.

Speaker 75 What is the poor thing, Mr. Maddox?

Speaker 76 What is the poor?

Speaker 19 There's Maddox in front of the pick rick with his black suit and bald head.

Speaker 67 Protesters shouting, cameras all around.

Speaker 60 He's in heaven.

Speaker 58 I'll use axe channels. I'll use guns.

Speaker 78 I'll use paint.

Speaker 58 I'll use my fists.

Speaker 78 I'll use my customers.

Speaker 58 I'll use my employees, I'll use anything at my disposal.

Speaker 78 This property belongs to me, my wife, and my children. It doesn't belong to anybody else.

Speaker 58 I'll throw out a white one, or a black one, or a red-headed one, or a bald-headed one.

Speaker 78 It doesn't make any difference.

Speaker 29 Maddox gets called into court because the Civil Rights Act has been passed and what he's doing is illegal.

Speaker 62 He's given a choice, integrate or shut his doors.

Speaker 47 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.

Speaker 46 And to every southerner angry at the way the world is turning, he becomes a hero.

Speaker 21 A friend says to him, you know, maybe you should run for governor.

Speaker 55 And Maddox says, okay.

Speaker 21 And in 1966, he wins.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 46 And by the way, it's a very close race.

Speaker 59 Maddox doesn't actually get as many votes as his opponent, but he wins when the election is thrown to the legislature.

Speaker 72 Oh, and a huge part of Maddox's rhetoric is how the media can't be trusted.

Speaker 34 He's constantly accusing newspapers of lying about him.

Speaker 37 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.

Speaker 59 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.

Speaker 60 I mean, when has that ever happened?

Speaker 79 Maddox serves four years, has to step down because of term limits.

Speaker 56 Jimmy Carter takes over as governor of Georgia, as the state, you might say, returns to its senses.

Speaker 47 And Maddox consoles himself with running for and winning the job of lieutenant governor.

Speaker 39 He is well on his way to obscurity.

Speaker 13 And then he gets a call from New York, from the Dick Cavett Show, the great late-night talk show of the 1970s.

Speaker 64 They want him as a guest.

Speaker 44 That's when we return.

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Speaker 4 where you can see the sky.

Speaker 12 Best network based on analysis by OOCLA of Speed Test Intelligence Data 1H 2025.

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Speaker 57 In America, you get food deep.

Speaker 57 Won't have to run through the jungle and scuff up your feet.

Speaker 38 The first Randy Newman song I ever heard was Sail Away.

Speaker 57 You just sing about Jesus and drink wine all day.

Speaker 57 It's great to be an American.

Speaker 20 Sail Away is the title track of the album Randy Newman made right before he wrote Good Old Boys.

Speaker 25 I was a kid when I first heard it.

Speaker 54 And I had the same experience I would later have with Newman's other songs.

Speaker 10 I didn't get it at first.

Speaker 37 I'm not sure I even paid attention to the words.

Speaker 25 I just loved how grand it was.

Speaker 57 Ain't no lion, a tiger, ain't no mama snake.

Speaker 57 Just a sweet watermelon in the buckwheat cake.

Speaker 57 Everybody is as happy as a man can be.

Speaker 57 Climb a boy, little wall, play the way with

Speaker 53 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.

Speaker 63 Oh, it was uh

Speaker 63 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,

Speaker 63 to do 10-minute thing.

Speaker 63 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

Speaker 63 this guy be standing in a clearing

Speaker 63 in the jungle and singing this song. And that was what I was going to do with my 10 10 minutes.

Speaker 46 Randy Newman wrote a song about an American slave trader standing somewhere in West Africa, giving his sales pitch to potential recruits.

Speaker 50 Come to America.

Speaker 52 You're going to love this little cotton plantation that I've lined up for you.

Speaker 63 Ain't no lion or tiger, ain't no mom or snake.

Speaker 57 Just a sweet watermelon in the book we get, you know.

Speaker 63 It's a nose laugh.

Speaker 57 Yeah.

Speaker 51 The character is so kind of outrageous,

Speaker 50 but we're not laughing along with him.

Speaker 69 We're horrified by him.

Speaker 63 I mean, it's... Yeah, but people laugh at that in a nervous way at the watermelon joke and

Speaker 63 sit around, think about Jesus, drink wine all day.

Speaker 2 Now, there's a way to do that song so that it's not so shocking.

Speaker 56 Like the cover version done later the same year by Bobby Darren, who was one of the biggest pop stars of the 1960s.

Speaker 63 Bobby Darren is happy. Yeah.

Speaker 63 Come to America, Little One. You know, they got rid of the Wog.

Speaker 63 Oh my God.

Speaker 29 But

Speaker 81 that's like blasphemy.

Speaker 57 Climb aboard Little One and sail away with me.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 42 I'm sorry, I can't get I can't get past this so quickly.

Speaker 13 That's unbelievable.

Speaker 63 That he did a happy version?

Speaker 44 Yes.

Speaker 77 It's this it isn't.

Speaker 63 I mean, there's there it is.

Speaker 41 The thing is, Newman liked Bobby Darren.

Speaker 50 He knew him, and he didn't know what to think.

Speaker 13 I mean, there is a world of difference between wog and one.

Speaker 25 Also, if I'm not mistaken, Bobby Darren substitutes the words mamba snake with mama snake.

Speaker 72 Ain't no lions and tigers and no nurturing mama snake.

Speaker 63 You know, he was, oh, I'll do it. I'd like to do that.
And it's like, come to America, you know.

Speaker 79 But this is this, this song is like a snake.

Speaker 63 He's not a dumb guy, you know.

Speaker 42 This song is like a, it is a wallop.

Speaker 38 It is emotional wallop.

Speaker 51 It is a searing song about

Speaker 51 the darkest moment in America's past.

Speaker 63 It's a jaw drop. It's like springtime for Hitler in a way.

Speaker 57 Little one.

Speaker 63 Come away with me. You know, it just was so right.

Speaker 63 His chovious instincts couldn't

Speaker 63 restrain himself.

Speaker 51 How did you feel when you first heard that version?

Speaker 63 I felt, you know, oh my Jesus Christ,

Speaker 63 and that was it.

Speaker 38 The original intention of Sail Away was to make the listener uncomfortable.

Speaker 37 Newman takes a familiar figure, a salesman, an entrepreneur, a patriot, and gives him a rollicking sea shanty.

Speaker 62 But then he forces you to acknowledge that underneath all that, there lurks a monster.

Speaker 44 Bobby Darren chickened out.

Speaker 13 He couldn't do it.

Speaker 48 He didn't want us to be uncomfortable, and so Wog became one, and Sail Away became a glorified nursery rhyme.

Speaker 34 I don't mean to single Bobby Darren out, because I think that most of us take the easy path in these situations too.

Speaker 37 But the particular genius of Randy Newman is that he won't do that.

Speaker 44 He can't.

Speaker 57 The Dick Cabot Show!

Speaker 47 So, it's 1970.

Speaker 51 Lester Maddox gets a call from Dick Cabot.

Speaker 48 Come on our show.

Speaker 47 He flies to New York.

Speaker 34 And who tunes in that night?

Speaker 48 Randy Newman.

Speaker 76 Ladies and gentlemen,

Speaker 83 Dick Cabot.

Speaker 31 Dick Cavett is a year into his legendary late-night show on ABC, up against Johnny Carson's tonight show.

Speaker 29 Cavott's show was like a highlight reel of the 1970s.

Speaker 31 He did the greatest ever interview with Jimi Hendrix.

Speaker 41 Groucho Marks was a regular.

Speaker 39 So was Muhammad Ali.

Speaker 25 He once had Salvador Dalli on the same show as the legendary pitching great Satchel Page.

Speaker 20 The famous debate between Gourvadal and Norman Mailer?

Speaker 59 That was on Dick Cavett.

Speaker 83 Listen, we have a very good show tonight, and I want to move right into it.

Speaker 83 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.

Speaker 27 Cat eyeglasses, hair in a bun, who brings a box full of cockroaches to the

Speaker 83 What can we do about them? What can we learn about them? Are they our friends?

Speaker 74 No, they're not exactly our friends, but they are certainly our companions in all our.

Speaker 74 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.

Speaker 83 They go back that far?

Speaker 44 They go back that far.

Speaker 83 That's older than the dinosaurs.

Speaker 74 Twice as old as the dinosaurs. All the way back to the coal age.
They were already recognizably cockroaches.

Speaker 83 It's always the people you don't like who are the last to leave, isn't it?

Speaker 74 They'll be here long after we have quitted this earth, I'm sure.

Speaker 16 Kevin does a good 10 minutes on cockroaches.

Speaker 83 Are these your cockroaches or some of ours?

Speaker 49 The cockroach lady finally leaves the stage.

Speaker 69 And then.

Speaker 83 My next guest tonight is Governor Lester Maddox.

Speaker 49 How comes Maddox, the gleaming bald head, the black suit.

Speaker 83 Governor Maddox,

Speaker 83 I still call you Governor, don't I?

Speaker 76 Call me most anything you want to, everybody else does.

Speaker 57 Kip yourself, Dick.

Speaker 75 Have you ever followed Bugs before?

Speaker 76 Yes, a few moments ago on your program, sir.

Speaker 44 That's the only time.

Speaker 64 That's the only time?

Speaker 41 God, I love Dick Cavett.

Speaker 49 They shake hands.

Speaker 25 They take their seats, rust-colored swivel loungers atop a gray shag carpet.

Speaker 19 Cavott shows the audience a photograph of Maddox holding his axe handle outside the Pick pickrick restaurant.

Speaker 64 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.

Speaker 76 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.

Speaker 76 There were six of them in each of the kegs, and they were dark red because that was the uh

Speaker 76 it looked something similar to a chicken leg a pick handle does. Not like the axe handle that the news media talks about.

Speaker 49 And Cavitt, who must be wondering, what on earth, simply says.

Speaker 83 Well, I've certainly learned a lot.

Speaker 19 Cavot brings on his next guest, the football player Jim Brown, then one of the most famous professional black athletes in the country.

Speaker 16 Brown settles down next to Maddox, who is literally half his size, and gives him a polite smile.

Speaker 64 And Cavot says to the two of them, Do you feel separate but equal?

Speaker 67 I realize that's 1960s civil rights humor, but I still think it's hilarious.

Speaker 49 Maddox turns to Brown and says, I thought you was the singer.

Speaker 62 He thought Jim Brown was James Brown.

Speaker 32 He then volunteers his personal definition of what being a segregationist really means.

Speaker 76 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.

Speaker 76 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.

Speaker 44 Amalgamated?

Speaker 45 Good lord.

Speaker 23 Now think about this for a moment.

Speaker 39 Maddox is no longer governor.

Speaker 59 Georgia has come to its senses and elected nice, safe, modern, non-racist Jimmy Carter.

Speaker 47 Maddox is a footnote.

Speaker 37 So what point is there in having him on a mainstream talk show like Dick Cavett?

Speaker 52 The magazine where I work, The New Yorker, had a case like this recently.

Speaker 59 Donald Trump's Bengali Steve Bannon was invited to speak at the magazine's annual literary festival, and everyone flipped out.

Speaker 2 The New Yorker's writers took to Twitter.

Speaker 29 A bunch of high-profile celebrity invitees to the festival dropped out.

Speaker 56 And the argument that was made about Bannon is an argument that could as easily have been applied to Maddox years ago.

Speaker 37 What's the point of giving someone like that a platform?

Speaker 47 I mean, what could possibly be learned from listening to them talk?

Speaker 64 And sure enough, what happens over the course of the next hour of the Dick Cavit show?

Speaker 21 Exactly what you would think.

Speaker 75 I think what we're really talking about in this country is economic development of black people.

Speaker 47 At one point, Jim Brown says something thoughtful and reasonable, that he thinks the priority for black people ought to be economic development.

Speaker 48 And Maddox jumps on him.

Speaker 76 Economic development with all people.

Speaker 75 What we're talking about, I don't know.

Speaker 57 How come you have black people? How come you don't want to do it for black people?

Speaker 64 How come you don't want want to do it for white people?

Speaker 75 I'll tell you why.

Speaker 76 How come you don't do it for everybody? How come you're always black people?

Speaker 57 You're talking about all people.

Speaker 75 Can I give you an answer?

Speaker 83 I think we understand the question.

Speaker 75 Can I give you an answer? Do you mind?

Speaker 56 Go ahead.

Speaker 75 If you're ready, I'll give you time. Okay, Governor.

Speaker 75 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.

Speaker 75 Black people are more or less, along with the Indians,

Speaker 75 on the last rung of the ladder. Can I I finish, Governor?

Speaker 75 Can I finish?

Speaker 75 Okay, do you mind?

Speaker 75 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.

Speaker 76 What about equality of white people? Now, I'm going to interrupt you every time you keep calling black people.

Speaker 57 What about equality of all people?

Speaker 75 If you interrupt me, Governor, I can't talk to you.

Speaker 13 Then Maddox starts going on and on about all the things he's done for black people in the state of Georgia.

Speaker 50 And Jim Brown turns to him with genuine curiosity and asks if he's had any blowback from white bigots.

Speaker 57 From the bigots in the South?

Speaker 76 Have any problems with us?

Speaker 75 From the white bigots because you did so much for the black man.

Speaker 47 Which is kind of a great question.

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 57 Right?

Speaker 83 Mr. Brown asked you, Governor Maddox, if you'd had any trouble from your white admirers for the fact that you have them.

Speaker 57 I didn't say admirers, sir.

Speaker 83 No, he said bigots.

Speaker 76 Well, why didn't you say it like he said?

Speaker 57 You have bigots.

Speaker 76 Why didn't you say it? Now, see that what I'm talking about, Dick?

Speaker 83 I do see it.

Speaker 76 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.

Speaker 76 You said admirers, and he said bigots. A lot of difference, isn't it?

Speaker 52 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.

Speaker 42 Maddox asks Cavitt to apologize.

Speaker 41 Cavott refuses.

Speaker 37 The audience makes astonished noises.

Speaker 47 Maddox stands up and starts to walk off the stage.

Speaker 70 Cavott says, come on, sit down. Maddox says, I'll sit down when you apologize.

Speaker 83 So Cavitt says, If I called any of your admirers bigots, who are not bigots, I apologize.

Speaker 67 This is insane.

Speaker 65 What was Dick Cavett thinking inviting this guy in his show?

Speaker 76 Why don't you apologize to people, Georgia, those friends of mine, for calling them bigots?

Speaker 57 I think I may.

Speaker 44 Either you do it, I'm going to leave now.

Speaker 81 Wait a minute. Wait a minute.
Please don't leave.

Speaker 83 I'd like to speak with Georgia.

Speaker 76 And he owes them an apology, too. The only bigots that I'm...

Speaker 81 Wait, wait, no, wait, no, wait.

Speaker 50 Maddox gives Cavot an ultimatum.

Speaker 45 One minute to take it back, or he'll walk out for good.

Speaker 41 At which point, Jim Brown pipes up.

Speaker 13 Wait, what about me?

Speaker 50 How much time do I have?

Speaker 67 It's a circus.

Speaker 83 I would say that I phrased the question in a way that was not exactly accurate in the sense that he did say bigots.

Speaker 83 Have any white bigots been upset because you have done certain things for the people?

Speaker 76 He came back and said, my admirers, and you haven't apologized yet, and you got 15 seconds.

Speaker 83 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.

Speaker 83 Wait a minute, wait a minute. There's more time.

Speaker 55 And Lester Maddox storms off to set.

Speaker 37 Oh, oh, and I haven't even mentioned that the writer Truman Capote then shows up.

Speaker 61 He's then at the height of his celebrity, tiny, fastidious, wearing purple-tinted round sunglasses.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 57 And,

Speaker 84 you know, well, it was, called Picarab, Nicaragu, something here. And he was always at the door with guns, you know, to keep

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 39 The whole thing is so bananas that Cabot feels a need to apologize to his audience.

Speaker 83 I asked him if he would please come back and use the last minutes to say whatever he would like to say because

Speaker 83 he felt that I guess that he was insulted.

Speaker 83 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

Speaker 83 I don't know what, but I I found him in spite of the fact that I would probably despise his feelings about

Speaker 83 segregation if I were actually clear on what they are,

Speaker 83 a likable man. Would anyone go along with this? Would you agree?

Speaker 59 The audience is not having it.

Speaker 83 Why is there? What?

Speaker 78 I'm back down, man.

Speaker 83 I'm not backing down. Shut up.
I'll tell you when I'm backing down.

Speaker 63 We'll be back after this.

Speaker 79 It was a farce.

Speaker 47 What was the point?

Speaker 38 Except to allow a segregationist to play the victim.

Speaker 48 What good is there in giving someone like that a platform?

Speaker 21 Except Randy Newman was watching. Whose imagination has a mind of its own.

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Speaker 29 So were you a regular Dick Cabot watcher in those years?

Speaker 63 Not that I recall. I was

Speaker 45 uh

Speaker 63 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.

Speaker 56 And stereotypically you are the Dick Cabot audience, right?

Speaker 57 I am, yeah.

Speaker 63 It seemed like half an hour, you know, where they were just yelling and yelling and yelling.

Speaker 45 He was, yeah.

Speaker 63 He was so alien that I felt sorry for him.

Speaker 41 He didn't dismiss that whole exchange or shrug or change the channel.

Speaker 47 He reacted to it.

Speaker 38 He imagines what a supporter of Lester Maddox would think watching Lester Maddox storm off the stage.

Speaker 76 Now Dick,

Speaker 76 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.

Speaker 38 He gives that imaginary supporter a name.

Speaker 48 Johnny Cutler, a home, Birmingham, Alabama, a job, steel worker.

Speaker 44 He imagines Johnny Cutler coming home one night, drunk, gazing at his sleeping wife.

Speaker 66 And then he imagines him turning on the television.

Speaker 57 Last night I saw Lester Maddox on a TV show

Speaker 57 with some smart-ass New York Jew.

Speaker 57 And the Jew laughed at Lester Maddox.

Speaker 57 And the audience laughed at Lester-Maddocks too.

Speaker 57 Well, it may be.

Speaker 63 on it too. So, small ass New York, too.
That's good.

Speaker 63 The audience laughs at Lister Maddox 2.

Speaker 63 That's pretty good.

Speaker 63 Yeah, that really is going to click a, click a, click a.

Speaker 38 That became the first song on Good Old Boys.

Speaker 23 It's called Rednecks.

Speaker 55 When I first heard that, I didn't know Lister Maddox was.

Speaker 34 Yeah. I didn't even know that it was.

Speaker 51 But that idea of the southerner going to New York and sitting down.

Speaker 63 And thinking get cavity is Jewish, too.

Speaker 45 It's fantastic.

Speaker 57 Will he maybe a fool, but he's a fool.

Speaker 57 And if they think they're better than him, they're wrong.

Speaker 57 So when I came to this park, I took some.

Speaker 18 You want to sing along, don't you?

Speaker 53 It's like Sail Away all over again.

Speaker 57 This is where I made this song.

Speaker 49 But then comes this.

Speaker 57 We talk real funny down here.

Speaker 57 We drank too much and we laughed too loud.

Speaker 57 We're too dumb to make it in no northern town.

Speaker 57 We're keeping near us down.

Speaker 34 It's 1970.

Speaker 30 The South is in upheaval.

Speaker 38 Lester Maddox has just been humiliated by some smart-ass New York Jew.

Speaker 44 What do you think Johnny Cutler's gonna say?

Speaker 57 College men out of LSU.

Speaker 57 When in dumb, come out dumb too.

Speaker 57 Hustling round Atlanta in the alligator shoes.

Speaker 57 Getting drunk every weekend at the barbecues. And keeping the negress down.

Speaker 55 How did people respond to that song at the time?

Speaker 63 I played it in Lafayette,

Speaker 63 Louisiana, and they loved it.

Speaker 63 I got a letter, the only one I ever got, on this song,

Speaker 63 from somebody. And he said, dear sir,

Speaker 63 I was in the audience in Lafayette when you played this song. He's a black kid.
And he said,

Speaker 63 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

Speaker 63 guys

Speaker 57 yelling rednecks with rednecks, you know.

Speaker 57 and he said it made him very uncomfortable and he wanted to let me know we're red next we're red next

Speaker 47 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

Speaker 63 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,

Speaker 63 in the south.

Speaker 21 He had to stop singing it.

Speaker 37 Many radio stations wouldn't play it.

Speaker 40 And you definitely wouldn't hear that song on the radio today.

Speaker 37 It even feels strange to play it here.

Speaker 40 We've become, appropriately, uncomfortable with the N-word in almost any context.

Speaker 38 You can only play Rednecks now if you explain where it came from and who Johnny Cutler was.

Speaker 21 But you can't not play it just because it makes you feel uncomfortable.

Speaker 59 Because Johnny Cutler in Birmingham, Alabama in 1970 absolutely wanted to keep the niggers down.

Speaker 19 And we can't gloss over that fact if we're being honest.

Speaker 62 Oh, and by the way, Johnny Cutler wasn't done.

Speaker 57 Down here we too ignorant to realize

Speaker 57 that the North is set to neglect free.

Speaker 59 He then names every slum in every northern city.

Speaker 57 Putting a cage in Harlem

Speaker 38 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,

Speaker 25 are you still sure you're better than me?

Speaker 47 You have to play that too.

Speaker 38 Because if you're going to be honest about who Lester Maddox really was, you have to be honest about his critics too.

Speaker 55 Did you ever hear from Lester Maddox?

Speaker 63 He sent me an axe.

Speaker 45 He didn't, really? Yeah.

Speaker 64 Oh, that's fantastic.

Speaker 63 From his store. He sold axe handles.
Yeah.

Speaker 64 Yeah, pick handles, as he would tell.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 52 Revisionist History is produced by Mia LaBelle and Jacob Smith with Camille Baptista.

Speaker 25 Our editor is Julia Barton.

Speaker 31 Flon Williams is our engineer.

Speaker 10 Fact-checking by Beth Johnson.

Speaker 56 Original music by Luis Guerra.

Speaker 23 Special thanks to Carly Migliore, Heather Fane, Maggie Taylor, Maya Koenig, and Jacob Weisberg.

Speaker 37 Revisionist History is brought to you by Pushkin Industries.

Speaker 45 I'm Malcolm Gladbow.

Speaker 38 By the way, there's a great essay on this subject in the 2014 book, Let the Devil Speak by Stephen Hart.

Speaker 38 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.

Speaker 50 Come aboard Little One and say, Sail Away.

Speaker 57 Daddy, what you can't.

Speaker 63 I think this is sort of happy. I mean, certainly the voices make it that way.
You can't do it.

Speaker 29 Yeah, it's lost all of its...

Speaker 77 I like that buck we cake.

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