[3] He achieves this by singing that the "North has set the nigger free", and then claims African-Americans are only "free to be put in a cage," before listing a number of black ghettos in northern cities (e.g. Roxbury in Boston, East St. Louis and Harlem in New York City) The verse's final lyric is: "They [the Northerners] gatherin' 'em up, from miles around/Keepin' the niggers down."
Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Randy Lewis said Newman had "peeled back the curtain on... bigots and hypocrites" with this song.
Hart maintains that Cavett was, if anything, too diffident with Maddox, who played word games about the meaning of racism and segregation before "taking theatrical umbrage" and storming off the set only a few minutes before the end of the show.
He said he wrote the song after watching Maddox's appearance with Cavett and "seeing him be treated rudely... they had just elected him governor, in a state of 6 million or whatever, and if I were a Georgian, I would have been offended, irrespective of the fact that he was a bigot and a fool.
"[2] Newman said that, having written "Rednecks", he felt he had to explain where he was coming from, which led him to write "Marie" and "Birmingham", two other songs that ended up on his Good Old Boys album.