Song of the Day 7/24: Randy Newman, “Sail Away”

For 200 years now some people have maintained that slavery was a benefit to the enslaved – “They were better off than they were in Africa” goes the refrain. In Florida, that’s now official history. Under the state’s new educational standards, students will be taught that slavery benefitted the enslaved.

Abraham Lincoln had the proper response: “Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.” Ron DeSantis has a history degree from Yale Univesity, but I don’t think he spent much time reading about Lincoln.

I think the new curriculum should include this Randy Newman classic from his 1972 LP of the same name. His slave-trading narrator makes the same pitch to his would-be passengers: “Ain’t no lion or tiger, ain’t no mamba snake. Just the sweet watermelon and the buckwheat cake.” There are probably lots of white people in Florida who think Newman was sincere – with that sweet melody, he must have been, right? – so it should be easy to smuggle in his real message.

Newman told Rolling Stone in 2017 how the song started.

There was a producer, the husband of Leslie Caron. He wanted to make a movie where he would give ten minutes to these artists – people like Van Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, me – to do anything we wanted. It never got made. But I had this idea of a slave ship and a sea shanty – this guy standing in a clearing, singing to a crowd of natives. These people in my songs don’t know they’re bad. They think they’re fine. I didn’t just want to say, ‘Slavery is awful.’ It’s too easy. I wasn’t doing Roots.

Newman sweetened the tune even more with his orchestral arrangement (his uncle Emil conducted). Rock critic Greil Marcus called the song “a vision of heaven superimposed on hell,” which also serves as a good description of Florida.

Many people, including Harry Nilsson and Etta James, have recorded the song. The best-known cover is probably by Ray Charles, who used it to close his 1975 LP “Renaissance.”

Perhaps the most unusual arrangement of “Sail Away” was by a local group popular during the Wilmington Renaissance back in the late ’70s, the Melton Brothers Band with Alfie Moss.