Regarding Robert Hilburn’s 'A Few Words in Defense of Our Country: The Biography of Randy Newman' (Hachette)

Until now, with Robert Hilburn’s new A Few Words in Defense of Our Country, the book on Newman was Kevin Courrier’s unfailingly inquisitive Randy Newman’s American Dreams (Toronto: ECW Press, 2005); there wasn’t even a 33 1/3 series entry on 12 Songs or Bad Love. Written with Newman’s cooperation—it ends with his children speaking—this is a project Hilburn has been nurturing even before it appeared before him as a book. First writing about music for the Los Angeles Times in 1966, the chief pop critic there from 1970 to 2005, and continuing as a contributor long after that, he was on the ground for the whole story. He watched it take shape. He caught the grandeur of Newman’s ambitions, but, as one of the best interviewers in the field—you could feel, as you read his conversations with everyone from Bob Dylan on down, that people trusted him, that they wanted to tell him what they didn’t want to tell anyone else—he never missed the frustrations that bled from Newman when he fell short, and in his book he has gotten it all on the page. The title is more than perfect—it speaks to Hilburn’s ambitions as much as Newman’s. The portrait he draws is of an artistic citizen, a critical patriot, a singer and composer taking the First Amendment not as a grant of the freedom to speak, but as the obligation to speak, and to find the form that will translate the American predicament into tales that deserve to sink into the stories America tells itself about itself as deeply as any words from Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, Chuck Berry, Jackson Pollock, or Franklin Roosevelt, carried by melodies and arrangements that can seem, as Harold Bloom said of the Band’s songs, as if they had always been there, waiting for the right person to find them. Who wrote “Sail Away”? Was it a Jewish guy from a well-off family in Los Angeles, or the country itself, which before Newman staked his claim to it had never had the nerve to say it all out loud? The great drama of Hilburn’s book, as it ends, is that the story isn’t over—that there are a lot more words in defense of his country Randy Newman is going to have to write and sing.

For his book, Hilburn asked various people to contribute a paragraph or a page. I was lucky to be one of them, and to have a chance to live up to Bob’s work.

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Around the time of Randy Newman’s 12 Songs, his second album, way back in the late sixties, his producer, Lenny Waronker, liked to call him “The King of the Suburban Blues Singers.” There was an affinity with Robert Johnson, whose King of the Delta Blues Singers, a 1961 collection of songs recorded in 1936 and 1937, shared a sense of fate as a joke everyone would get sooner or later.

Me and the devil were walking side by side
Me and the devil were walking side by side
You can hold my hand, honey, you know I love to see
you smile

It wouldn’t be long before Randy would play the devil himself in “Sail Away,” and as the slave recruiter tempting Africans on the boat to the USA, enter into a classic role, the Yankee Pedlar, the Slick Willie, the All-American con artist, who can sell swampland in Florida to New Englanders and the Middle Passage as a vacation. “He traded the landlord out of bed and breakfast and left with most of the money in the settlement,” Constance Rourke wrote in 1931 in American Humor of her match to Randy’s slave man—the only difference being that he left with all the people.

As a song title, “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country” is the book Randy Newman has been writing all these many decades down the pike. He’s played every role, from the worst to—everyone else, he himself hiding in the same crowd of anyone listening.

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A Few Words in Defense of Our Country is available through Hachette Book Group.