They’re Still Tryin’ to Wash Us Away

One of my favorite albums of the 1970s is Good Old Boys by Randy Newman. Though the album was originally planned as a full-on concept album, à la The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars or The Wall, about an everyman from the Deep South named John Cutler; eventually, the album became less ambitious, although the general Southern theme remained exploring the thoughts of several Southerners throughout its playtime. The album came out at a critical moment in the history of Dixie. Home Rule had been broken by literal bayonets, but Southerners remained a proud and defiant people. In this sense, Good Old Boys can be seen as part of the Southern cultural revival of the 1970s, the same movement that also produced Lynyrd Skynyrd and Smokey and the Bandit.

One of the best songs on the album is “Louisianna 1927” – a song about the devastating Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 that killed around 500 people and utterly destroyed large parts of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas, with cost estimates ranging upwards to $17.3 billion in 2023 dollars. The song’s narrator describes how the flood began when clouds from the North came in. He then laments what is happening to his land in the chorus:

Louisiana, Louisiana
They’re tryin’ to wash us away
They’re tryin’ to wash us away
Louisiana, Louisiana
They’re tryin’ to wash us away
They’re tryin’ to wash us away

Randy Newman is not our guy and is likely just singing from the perspective of his character, but all the same, the song does have themes that Southern Nationalists should be able to greatly appreciate – themes of an oppressive force coming from the North and utterly destroying everything this man knows and loves. The third verse goes on to describe the terrible federal (i.e. Yankee) response to the disaster:

President Coolidge come down in a railroad train
With a little fat man with a notepad in his hand
President say, “Little fat man, isn’t it a shame
What the river has done to this poor cracker’s land?“

If you were curious, the “little fat man” is Herbert Hoover; a man who would later become vilified, along with Abraham Lincoln, by a generation of Southerners who saw him as the symbol of everything they hated about the Republican Party.

Witnessing the devastating impact of Helene and Milton on Florida, and even more so North Carolina and Tennessee in light of “Louisiana 1927,” and the real history that inspired the song, should make Southerners realize just how rotten the Union is. It has been almost 100 years since the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, but nothing has changed for the better in Dixie and her place in the Yankee Empire. We remain a colony in all but name and the Yankee, at best, is indifferent and, at worse, is supportive of our deaths. We gain nothing by remaining in this cursed alliance.

If anything has changed, they have just become even more open in their hatred of us. They have tried numerous times, but they have never been able to break Southerners because we simply refuse to be broken. They thought we had been broken after the War, but we rose up and forced them into the Home Rule compromise. They thought we were broken after the end of Home Rule, but once again we refused to be broken, the Confederate flag continued to be widely flown throughout for two more generations. And they thought we were broken after the Great Cultural Revolution of 2015-2020, but we’re still here. Hence why they are aggressively moving illegal immigrants into the South – they hope to move in foreign voters to flip our states.

But, still it has not been enough. The average Southerner is more rightwing than the typical “American” and our people are moving even further to the Right. Polling is now showing that 2/3rds of Southern Republicans – a good proxy for gauging the opinion of native Southern Whites – now supports secession. Southern independence is no longer a fringe idea. Hence why the terrible federal response is so telling, just as it was in 1927. They are still trying to break us. They want us dead and replaced, and they make no bones about it.

The clouds are still coming from the North and they’re still tryin’ to wash us away.