“Louisiana 1927” by Randy Newman

Randy Newman's "Louisiana 1927" comes from Good Old Boys, his 1974 album, and it's a history lesson sung from inside the flood. The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 left 700,000 people homeless across Louisiana and Mississippi, and Newman tells it through a nameless local watching the water pour over St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes. Then Washington arrives, in the form of a made-up visit from President Calvin Coolidge, who surveys the ruin with all the warmth of a man checking his watch.

Newman arranged it, sings it and plays the piano, with Lenny Waronker and Russ Titelman producing and Lee Herschberg engineering and mixing. Decades later, in 2026, CBS News named it one of the 250 essential American songs from the past 250 years.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.