Rednecks (song)

"Rednecks"
Song by Randy Newman
from the album 'Good Old Boys'
Language	English
Released	1974
Genre	Rock
Songwriter(s)	Randy Newman

"Rednecks" is a song by Randy Newman, the lead-off track on his 1974 album Good Old Boys.

"Rednecks" is sung from the perspective of a Southern "redneck". In it he expresses his dismay at the way that the North looks down upon The South. In particular the narrator describes his ire at watching a "smart-ass, New York Jew" mock Lester Maddox on a television program. (This is an allusion to Maddox's 1970 appearance on The Dick Cavett Show whose eponymous host is actually a gentile from Nebraska.) In response to his frustration at the television show, the narrator goes on to list, sarcastically, a litany of negative qualities that Southerners are reputed to have. He focuses especially on institutionalized racism, or, as the narrator puts it: "keeping the niggers down."

As the song ends, the narrator turns the knife on judgmental northerners, calling them out as hypocrites. He achieves this by singing that the "North has set the nigger free" and then sings African-Americans are only "free to be put in a cage," and then lists a number of black ghettos in northern cities (e.g. Roxbury in Boston, East St. Louis and Harlem in New York City) The song's final lyric is: "They [the Northerners] gatherin' 'em up, from miles around/Keeping the niggers down."

Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Randy Lewis said Newman had "peeled back the curtain on... bigots and hypocrites" with this song. In 1995, Newman admitted that he was still nervous performing the song.

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