Category: Marc Broussard


Covered in Folk: Randy Newman (Bonnie Raitt, The Duhks, J.J. Cale, Shelby Lynne, and 9 more!)

April 30th, 2008 — 01:49 am

Though my father hasn’t missed it in decades, I haven’t been able to attend the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival since I started teaching over a decade ago — something about the way a last gasp of hunker-down-and-teach takes over public education as we approach state testing, and the long downhill slide toward the end of the school year. But every year as we hit the last weekend in April my mind begins to muse upon the great acts I saw down there the few years I made it: Los Lobos, the Indigo Girls, Taj Mahal, Blues Traveler, the Neville Brothers, a holy host of Marsalis siblings, and many, many more.

What stands out strongest after all these years is the time I saw Randy Newman play a whole set of songs about rain in a downpour one year at Jazzfest. We were muddy football fields away from the stage, umbrella-less to boot, but what I remember best is the clarity of his set, just that wry warbly scratchy voice and a barroom piano style, over a substance chock full of extremely unreliable narrators and sarcasm, with a power that I had never really heard in his music before.

The scene was terrible; the view was worse. But Newman’s music got burned into my brain. And since then, though I haven’t made it to another performance, I’ve never passed up a chance to listen to his songs, no matter who is singing them.

Randy Newman’s original performances aren’t folk, quite — though as a set of produced music that, at its best, focuses and features the simple melodies and heartfelt, story-troped acoustic output of a songwriter and his stringed instrument, much of his songs share the qualities of both traditional folkways and modern singer-songwriter folk. That so many from the folkworld and beyond have managed to take his work and make it beautiful in their own way acknowledges this ground, it is true. But that the songs speak — as all good folk should — to a nation and a people and a heart all at once is both a testament to the inherent beauty in the songs themselves, and the inherent and universal beauty in the human condition, even at its most terrible and sodden and rained-upon, of which they speak so effectively.

Today, in honor of my tenth consecutive year missing Jazzfest, we bring you a predominantly southern-tinged set of Randy Newman coversongs. Though I could not resist a song or two from the lighter and less historically-relevant side of the Newman catalog, those younger folks who only know Newman from his recent work scoring Disney soundtracks may be pleasantly surprised to find that in his younger days, Newman was a gifted songwriter, known for his ability to expose the whole range of the human experience, from the poignant to the historical accurate to the absurd, rub it raw, and somehow manage to make it touching all the same. Sometimes, I guess, it takes a little rain to make you really understand.

Today’s bonus coversongs come with little fanfare after two megaposts in three days:

  • Randy Newman covers Harry Nilsson’s Remember
  • Randy Newman “covers” Every Man A King, bringing his trademark irony to lyrics originally by Huey P. Long just by singing them straight alongside his Good Old Boys

Randy Newman will play this year’s Jazzfest on Thursday evening. Can’t make it? Check out this related post @ Star Maker Machine: The Preservation Hall Jazz Band covers Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans

885 comments » | Bonnie Raitt, Chris Smither, Covered in Folk, JJ Cale, Mae Robertson, Marc Broussard, Martin Simpson, Peter Mulvey, Randy Newman, Shelby Lynne, The Duhks, Tim O'Brien