“Rednecks”/”Birmingham,” Randy Newman, and Southern Identity

The thing about the South is, we know we’re idiots. Not that we ourselves are stupid, but that’s how we’re viewed by the rest of the country. No one ever says someone from Oregon is an inbred cracker, for instance. Midwesterners may be boring, but they never had a major network television show dedicated to glorifying bootleggers running corn across Iowa county lines, for instance. No, we Southerners have a lot to answer for, but we’re not the idiots that a lot of people think we are.

Sure, there was that whole slavery thing (really, we’re sorry about it. White people have had a long history of being too lazy to do things when they could just get someone from another group to do it, for less pay). And we dropped the ball on integration for about, oh, a hundred years. And we still embrace the big, dumb, and loud when it comes to politics (Dubya is one of us, like it or not). Randy Newman is one of us, too, a New Orleans boy by way of Los Angeles and back again. So on that basis alone, I give him a free pass on “Rednecks.”

If you haven’t heard it…first off, he uses the n-word. He’s writing from the point of view of a typical good old boy (in fact, that’s the name of the album the song comes from, though I got it from a best-of compilation), and I can see where it wouldn’t necessarily be high on a lot of people’s playlists because of that (I saw him on “Austin City Limits” refusing to do the song, because “why do you think I can’t sing it?”). In that sense, he’s echoing Mark Twain, who used the n-word with such stunning regularity that people still have issues with “Huck Finn.” I didn’t get the whole controversy until I actually read the book, and then I understood. Twain sets a record for using the n-word, surely, though I’m afraid he might still be lagging behind any association of white people in the South (or the North, for that matter) who like to dress up and scare non-white people. Larry the Cable Guy fans, for instance.

The South is defined via pop culture as backwoods, infested with toothless morons who live to drink moonshine and knock up their first cousins. And with any groundless rumor and unwarranted stereotype, this one has basis in fact. We are backwoods, and proud of it. We went to freaking war with the rest of the country with maybe one gunsmith in Selma and a couple of fellas in Waycross who could whittle rifles real good, of course. When “The Dukes of Hazzard” is the single most important television show set in your neck of the woods, and “Deliverance” was filmed just down the road, you tend to be self-conscious.

Of course, we’re not all idiots down here. I recently read a couple of books by Lewis Grizzard, a Georgian (but we won’t hold that against him) who was pretty funny and insightful, even if I suspect him of having political views that I wouldn’t necessarily agree with (side note: I get tired of people lazily using “liberal” as a pejorative. Come up with something more clever, such as “practitioner of fellatio on small woodland creatures,” for instance). As he points out, and as Newman does in “Rednecks,” racism isn’t just a Southern thing. Y’all Yankees got nothing to brag about, basically is what each is saying.

On the flip side of that coin, “Birmingham” is both a gentle poke at the Southern attitude (who in their right mind would call Birmingham the equal of Paris or London?) and a celebration of said attitude (well, it is the greatest city in Alabama, when your competition is Montgomery, Mobile, and maybe Muscle Shoals, where Stax Records was located or recorded or was somehow or another connected to Muscle Shoals, I’m blanking on which of those options is the correct one). Once again, Newman inhabits a character, a regular working guy (the kind that Mitt Romney knows well, because he fired them a lot), a guy who don’t want much out of life except to work at a steel mill and go home to his wife and his dog Dan (the meanest dog in Alabama, naturally). Newman, by the way, is Jewish, something that still seems alien to a lot of Southerners even though they’ve been around since the beginning. But like any good writer of fiction, he inhabits the roles of both the redneck of “Rednecks” (who, after the jaunty first verse about how stupid he is, proves himself to be smarter when he talks about the North’s “enlightened” policy of putting blacks into ghettos in major urban areas) and the common man of “Birmingham” (a guy who really doesn’t have to answer to anybody for anything), and he does so with that rollicking, easy-going vocal delivery that “Family Guy” parodied so well in their Y2K episode (you know the one, where he’s writing songs about Lois getting an apple from the tree, because he just sings about whatever’s going on around him).

God help me, I love to listen to “Rednecks,” even though I wouldn’t do so in mixed company (it’s easy to see where someone might not get the premise of the song and think that Newman is actually espousing the views he posits, or at least they just don’t like the use of the n-word in the song). “We don’t know our ass from a hole in the ground” is a Southern-ism, and it’s appropriate for my hometown as much as it is for anywhere else. But as much as I take joy in that part of the song, I tip my hat to Newman when it comes to the second verse, because it would be easy to take pot-shots at the South without acknowledging that the North isn’t the land of opportunity that it was promised to be for freed slaves after the war. A dirty little secret about American history is that while many abolitionists were in it for the liberation of the slaves and wanted them to have every opportunity to make a good life for their families, some were secretly doubtful that the black man lacked the “mental capability” to live independent like the white man. Of course, this was a view that the slaveholders shared, because as long as they thought of the slaves as “children” it was easier to justify to themselves the conditions under which they “owned” them. Newman makes it clear that, yeah, us Southerners have a lot to be ashamed of with regards to slavery and segregation, but Northerners need to ask themselves why the urban landscapes of cities such as New York and Chicago suddenly became less desirable for white families to live in once blacks and other minorities started moving into the inner city. The distance between what we believe and what we do is something that this country needs to work on.