‘Dixie Flyer’: Randy Newman’s most autobiographical song
“The narrators of my songs are not to be trusted,” Randy Newman explained to a reporter back in 1980, “That’s hard for people to get sometimes. I’m willing to be a bad-guy narrator in a song to do what I want to do. I’m not really those people.”
Newman found himself making this point quite a bit at the time, largely in response to the backlash aimed at one of his more successful singles, ‘Short People’. The song was one of the first of his prolific songwriting career to cross into the mainstream, suggesting the possibility of a long-awaited breakout to a bigger audience in the 1980s.
Instead, Newman felt like all those new listeners got the wrong end of the stick, not picking up the character aspects of the song, or its satirical edge, and identifying its lyrics (“short people got no reason to live”), in a personal way, with the man singing them. “I didn’t like that kind of hit, I discovered; it isn’t what I would want to be known for. It worried me that some kid with some kind of growth problem would be hurt by the song,” he said.
Newman waited several years to record his next studio album, Trouble in Paradise, but it wasn’t until its follow-up, 1988’s Land of Dreams, that he seemed ready to cast aside some of his need for character cloaks and to start revealing more overtly personal aspects of himself and his life story within his songs. With the big rockstar accompaniment of Mark Knopfler and Geoff Lynne, Newman again had no intention of trying to make some sort of lo-fi, complicated art record to confirm his status as a cult hero. These songs were poppy, slick, and in some cases, surprisingly straightforward and biographical; at the age of 45, the comedic curmudgeon was putting himself out there.
This tone was set right from the album’s opening track, ‘Dixie Flyer’, which also happens to include one of the prettier, cinematic piano intros ever committed to tape, and when Newman’s voice enters, he could just as easily be talk-singing the first chapter of his memoir, describing a rail trip he’d taken as a small child from his home in Los Angeles to see relatives in New Orleans during World War II.
“I was born right here / November ’43 / Dad was a captain in the army / Fighting the Germans in Sicily / My poor little mama / Didn’t know a soul in L.A. / So we went down to the Union Station / Made our getaway.”
The Dixie Flyer was the name of that train bound for Louisiana, but it was also a reference to Newman’s mother, Adele, whose nickname was Dixie, and who would have been the main source of information for the song, considering Newman was still a baby when the events happened. “Remembering through a kid’s eyes is trying to remember what you had for breakfast two weeks ago,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 1988, “It gets pretty hazy”.
Hazy can be beautiful, though, and a lot of the imagery and word choice in ‘Dixie Flyer’ comes across like an impressionist painting or some good Hemingway prose: “Her own mother came to meet us at the station / Her dress as black as a crow in a coal mine / She cried when her little girl got off the train / Her brothers and her sisters came down from Jackson, Mississippi / In a great green Hudson driven by a Gentile they knew.”
Newman said the Land of Dreams album included a lot of “stuff that is sort of accurate. But it’s like the secondhand stuff you hear from your aunts and uncles when they talk about you at Thanksgiving…Is it all true? I would deny that to my grave. But I’ve always denied any connection with real life.”
