| Randy Newman – A Wedding In Cherokee County Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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A Wedding In Cherokee County This is a fantastic song and also a very dark one. Everything I write here is just my opinion... I believe this is the story of a man living in a very backwoods, rural area of the south. There are Cherokee Counties in many southern states: Alabama, Georgia, North/South Carolina and Texas to name just a few. I suppose the exact location of this tale is up to the listener's imagination (it is my personal opinion that Randy was thinking of Alabama). Let's begin by focusing on a particularly glaring aspect of this story. It appears that the narrator is about to marry a woman who has an unspecified form of mental retardation. This can be inferred from the way the narrater describes his bride to be at the very beginning of the song: "She don't do nothin' She don't say nothin' She don't feel nothin' She don't know nothin' Maybe she's crazy I don't know...". To me this is an uneducated man's description of someone with a mental illness. In the very next verse the evidence is only bolstered by the lines: Man, don't you think I know she hates me, man don't you think I know that she's no good, if she knew how she'd be unfaithful to be. I think she'd kill me if she could...". This is obviously not a consensual marriage arrangment. He knows the woman does not even enjoy his presence and the fact that he uses the words "if she knew how" and "if she could" shows the woman is incapable of doing anything about it. When we think of mental illness in a setting such as this we often jump to the conclusion that it is a result of family inter-breeding. Think Deliverance. You can hear the banjo already can't you? I believe this is precisely the kind of picture Randy wants to paint us. After all, this song comes from the album "Good Old Boys" which is a loose concept album on the south, including the "less than charming" aspects. Though the true cause of her condition is beside the point, it helps to create a more detailed portrait the situation. We find out about the woman's roots in the following lines "…Her papa was a midget, her mama was a whore, her grandad was a newsboy till he was 84 what a slimy old bastard he was…". While it's not likely her parents were siblings, based on the description of her "kinfolks" is it so outrageous to think that there was interbreeding somewhere down the family line? As a final piece of evidence to support my mental illness claim I want to examine the following line. "Today we will be married, And all the freaks that she knows will be there, And all the people from the village will be there to congratulate us". Based on everything stated up until this point I almost want to say that this woman is employed as a circus "freak". Based on what we know about her parents this could be completely plausible. For all we know her father (the midget) could have been a circus performer himself. So now let's examine the narrator and what kind of person he is. He is obviously somewhat of a social outcast. We know he is marrying a mentally disabled woman who he suspects hates him and would even kill him if she actually could. We also know he is impotent from the lines about his "mighty sword". I find him to be a very funny character and just a pitifully awkward guy. For all of what we know about the situation, he seems to have only good intentions. He genuinely cares about his bride to be and says he is even a braver, more complete person with her by his side. |
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