In writing about Donald Fagen's tribute to Ray Charles ("What I Do" from his 2006 album, Morph the Cat), I said that irony is his primary mode, and I stand by the statement (although "default position" might've been more accurate), but it got me thinking of the important tradition of irony in American art. Perhaps its source is Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which has been in the news again lately, and it's partially for this reason that Hemingway said that "all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn", in his famous pronouncement. The controversies, seemingly never-ending, surrounding the book are due to the language, and while the appropriateness of such language in our time is fair to debate, I don't think that it makes sense to question Twain's intentions. They're obvious. As he put it, the novel "is a book of mine where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and the conscience suffers defeat". Put more bluntly, during the story, Huck comes to realize that everything he'd learned was wrong, and he was willing to stand to it, come what may.

OK, what does all of this have to do with music? Well, another great American artist, Randy Newman, has been trying to achieve similar goals in a similar way for many years. And he too has been at the center of a few firestorms - the one about "Short People" was a good one, for example. And his 1974 album, Good Old Boys, one of his finest and most complex, is a masterpiece, like Twain's, with a sound heart and good intentions. Here's "Louisiana 1927" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGs2iLoDUYE) about another episode in the history of the Mississippi.