Randy Newman / Good Old Boys / 1974
Louisiana 1927
mournful, resigned, quietly bitter
A plainspoken ballad about the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, sung from inside the disaster rather than about it from a distance. Newman uses folk-hymn simplicity and a detached presidential visit to expose how catastrophe and political indifference intersect in the rural South.
natural disaster regional neglect class and condescension displacement Southern identity
Who's speaking
The narrator speaks as a Louisianan caught in the flood, using plain first-person plural in the chorus to voice a community rather than an individual; the verses shift to a more reportorial, almost folk-balladeer voice describing events and the president's visit.
What happens
The song opens with weather turning ominous, then rain and rising water overtaking towns along the river. The chorus personifies the flood as a deliberate act against the people of Louisiana. A second verse narrates a visit from President Coolidge, who arrives by train with an aide and offers a dismissive, almost mocking remark about the land's ruin. The song closes by repeating the washing-away refrain with mounting insistence.
How it's built
Two narrative verses framing a repeated chorus that functions like a spiritual or work song, its repetition swelling by the end into a near-chant. The plainness of the verse-chorus form mirrors folk and hymn traditions, letting the political sting of the Coolidge verse land against a backdrop of communal lament rather than editorializing.
Section by section
Opening verse
The song begins almost like a weather report, its flat, factual cadence lulling the listener before the flood's scale becomes clear. The specificity of place names roots the disaster in real geography rather than abstraction, giving the ballad a documentary weight.
Second verse
The river's escalation is tracked almost clinically, day and night, until human cost enters almost as an aside. This restraint mirrors how disaster reporting often flattens tragedy into data, which becomes part of the song's quiet critique.
First chorus
“tryin' to wash us away”
Here the flood shifts from meteorological event to metaphor for abandonment, as if nature and neglect are collaborating against the region. The repeated phrase turns lament into something closer to accusation.
Coolidge verse
“this poor cracker's land”
The arrival of a president by train, accompanied by a bureaucratic aide taking notes, introduces political spectacle into the disaster. The president's remark, delivered through a self-deprecating regional label, satirizes performative sympathy that treats catastrophe as a photo opportunity rather than a call to action.
Closing chorus
The refrain repeats with increasing density, its accumulation suggesting exhaustion and grief hardening into something more like protest. The lack of resolution mirrors the historical reality that recovery and accountability lagged far behind the water's retreat.
Craft
- personification
- The flood is described as an active, almost willful force acting against the people, turning a natural disaster into something resembling persecution.
- understatement and irony
- The president's remark about the land's ruin is delivered in folksy, diminutive language that trivializes the human cost, exposing the gap between official sympathy and the scale of suffering.
- repetition
- The chorus's insistence accumulates through the song, transforming a lyrical refrain into something closer to collective testimony or protest chant.
- vernacular diction
- Newman's use of colloquial, regional phrasing and a self-deprecating class label for the Southern land grounds the song in a specific voice rather than an outside observer's.
Reading it
Most readings treat this as a historically grounded protest song using the 1927 flood to comment on the federal government's indifference to poor, largely rural Southern communities, an interpretation reinforced by the pointed irony of the presidential visit. A secondary reading emphasizes the song as elegy rather than polemic, focused on communal loss and the eerie calm of watching nature or fate turn against a place, with the political verse functioning as one bitter detail within a larger meditation on vulnerability rather than the song's central argument.
Context
The song appears on Newman's 1974 concept album 'Good Old Boys,' which explores Southern identity, racism, and class through often unreliable or ironic narrators. The 1927 Mississippi flood was a landmark disaster in American history, exposing failures in flood management and disproportionately harming poor Black and white rural communities; Calvin Coolidge's administration was criticized for a slow, hands-off federal response, which the song's satirical presidential cameo directly references.
Listen for
- the shift from matter-of-fact verse narration to the swelling, hymn-like chorus
- the flat, almost bureaucratic tone used to describe rising water
- the ironic diminutive language given to the president's remark
- the way repetition in the final chorus intensifies without resolving
About Randy Newman
Randall Stuart Newman is an American singer-songwriter, pianist, composer, and arranger. Born in Los Angeles to an extended family of Hollywood film composers, he is known for his Americana-inspired songs, non-rhotic Southern-accented singing, and lyrics that are often mordant or satirical and delivered by an unreliable narrator.
b. 1943 / United States
Full biography and catalogue