Story of the song: Louisiana 1927 by Randy Newman

From The Indy archive: Robert Webb on a mesmerising account of an American tragedy

The track features on Newman’s album of ‘Southern discomfort’ in ‘Good Old Boys’ (Rex)

The great flood of 1927 changed the American South forever. After a heavy spring rain, the Mississippi burst its banks, covering land from Illinois down to Memphis in several feet of water. Louisiana was next. A clique of bankers and governors blew a levee above New Orleans to spare the city. The swollen river was diverted across the farms and plantations of St Bernard and Plaquemines parishes, leaving many homeless and without compensation. As the waters rose, hundreds lost their lives and millions their livelihoods.

“The cotton fields were wiped out... disemploying hundreds of thousands of Black field-workers,” said Randy Newman. “They all moved north and were greeted with open arms right across America.” Newman, born in New Orleans, was by no means the first to compose a song about the great flood. After the waters subsided, many wrote and sang of the tragedy. One piece of musical reportage written in 1927, Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie’s “When the Levee Breaks”, was later made famous by Led Zeppelin.

The great delta bluesman Big Bill Broonzy recalled that one record company executive promised $500 for the best song about the flood. The singer Bessie Smith won, with her “Back Water Blues”. “It had more feelings to it, and it had more sense, too,” said Broonzy. “I don’t think nobody in the world ever sang it like Bessie.” But no white songwriter has written of the flood like Newman.

“Louisiana 1927”, sung in the voice of one who escaped the rising waters, is mesmerising. It swells into an unbearable refrain: “Louisiana, Louisiana, they’re tryin’ to wash us away, they’re tryin’ to wash us away.” “A song like ‘Louisiana’, the intro to it, that sort of plantation music felt right to me,” said Newman. “[It’s] a conscious attempt to put you in the place I’m singing about or with the people I’m singing about.”

It was first recorded at Amigo Studios, Hollywood early in 1973. As a single, issued in 1975, it did nothing, but it remains a pivotal track on Newman’s album of “Southern discomfort”, Good Old Boys, and one of his greatest songs. In 1991 it was covered, and arguably bettered, by Aaron Neville.