In 1974, onstage before a crowd that had come to hear his Southern Gothic concept album Good Old Boys, singer-songwriter Randy Newman took a strange detour. “This,” he deadpanned, strumming his piano keys, “is an Albanian wedding song. It’s about the sexual frustrations of a young Albanian bridegroom.”1
The audience erupted in laughter. Most took it as one of Newman’s trademark quips—dark, off-kilter, maybe a little surreal. But the song, “A Wedding in Cherokee County,” and the comments that followed, weren’t just throwaway gags. They were a glimpse into one of the more unexpected corners of Newman’s creative imagination: his strangely sincere fascination with Communist Albania.
Yes, Albania.
Randy Newman performing in 1975. Rob Bogaerts (ANEFO), CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Throughout the 1970s and into the following decades, Newman maintained a curious obsession with the small, mountainous Balkan country, then one of the world’s most rigid and hermetically sealed communist regimes. Under dictator Enver Hoxha, Albania had cut off ties with the Soviet Union for being revisionist, and with Maoist China for being insufficiently doctrinaire. The country became an ideological island, suspicious of even its few former allies.2 For most Americans, Albania was a blank spot on the map, a punchline of its own. To Newman, it was perfect.
“I’ve followed the Albanians like some people follow the Dodgers,” the Los Angeles-born singer joked in interviews. But behind that joke was fascination. Decades later, during a 1994 concert in Berlin, he reflected on the same subject with lingering admiration: “What I admired about them was their independent foreign policy. They had no ally in the world.” Even North Korea was too far to the right for them.3
At one point, he even tried to write Albania an anthem. A sincere one. With lyrics about goatherds and lingering winter snow, he envisioned a hymn for a nation he saw as both tragic and absurd, stern and slightly heroic in its stubbornness. Of course, the gesture was always more symbolic than literal. Western music was banned in Communist Albania, and the song, even if completed, would have never reached Albanian ears. The real audience was American, and the anthem became less about reaching Albania than about reflecting on it from afar.4
Domestic goats featured on a 1968 Albanian stamp. Post of Albania, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
But the anthem, he later admitted, began to sound “too much like ‘Back Home Again in Indiana,’” which reflects his recognition that the composition was veering into the realm of clichéd Americana. Published in 1917, that song’s lyrics speak of a longing to return home to fragrant fields and the gleaming Wabash River, a nostalgic and idealized vision of the Hoosier State. Newman’s attempt to write an Albanian anthem yielded something similarly sentimental. Instead of crafting a piece that critically or authentically examined Albanian nationalism, he found himself inadvertently reproducing a style that epitomized American nostalgia and sentimentality, draining the project of its original purpose.5
Still, something lingered. The melody remained, but the setting shifted: from the snowy mountains of Albania to the sweltering backwoods of Alabama. The lyrics morphed, the characters transformed; the final version of the song, set in Cherokee County, fit right in with the rest of the tracks on the Southern Gothic concept album. For Newman, though, the essence of the original “Albanian wedding song” remained.
In live shows—Seattle (1974), Madison (1977), and Berlin (1994)—Newman continued to reference its origins. “This is the Albanian part right here,” he’d say, mid-performance, before singing a solemn, faux-heroic bridge about a gray wolf hunting in the woods and how a woman’s love gives her husband strength.6
Gray wolf darts through the snow on a 1964 Albanian stamp. Post of Albania, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
It always got a laugh. But like much of Newman’s work, the joke was layered. His imagined Albania—land of wolves, goatherds, and nationalist longing—reflected not reality, but an exaggerated invention born out of distance and ideology. Albania, to most Americans in the Cold War era, was a mystery. Its seclusion turned it into a kind of geopolitical myth—simultaneously absurd, intimidating, and seemingly insignificant. For Newman, that obscurity made it ideal for satire. By invoking Albania, he could poke fun at the ways Americans imagined “the other,” how entire cultures could be reduced to caricature and used as stand-ins for ideological conflict, particularly those like Albania, whose rigid Stalinism and isolationist policies made it appear not just foreign, but ideologically alien to American audiences raised on the polarized thinking of the era.7
Newman’s style of satire was simple on the surface but sharp underneath. On Good Old Boys, he sang in the voice of racists, bigots, and buffoons—not to endorse them, but to lay them bare. The album critiques not just Southern racism but also Northern hypocrisy (“Rednecks”); it celebrates figures like the assassinated populist Huey Long (“Kingfish”). The demo tape for Good Old Boys, recorded in 1973, reveals how Newman envisioned his Albanian anthem at home within a satirical project that never ventured beyond the American South. The song came not from Albania, but out of a television set tuned to a variety show. “And now,” the host announces, “the West Point Glee Club will do their rendition of the Albanian national anthem.”8
It’s a strikingly absurd image, one country’s military academy choir singing the anthem of an ideologically opposed nation—textbook Newman. His Albanian fixation, if one can call it that, was an exotic extension of the Southern Gothic concept album. The song wasn’t about Albania specifically; it was about how Americans mythologize and often misunderstand the world within and beyond their borders.
Newman himself admitted he didn’t know much about Albania. He bought its newspapers, read up on its purges, but confessed that the country’s very elusiveness was part of the allure. “They have a real crazy history, and real crazy music,” he said.9 When he couldn’t sustain the anthem idea, he didn’t abandon the absurdity—he relocated it. On Good Old Boys, “A Wedding in Cherokee County” makes the Southern experience feel as foreign and fictional as the imagined Albania it grew out of. Newman’s bridegroom fears wolves in dawn-lit forests and carries pastoral echoes of the goatherd, imagery lifted directly from his unfinished Albanian anthem. His anxiety over his “mighty sword,” his invocation of “all the freaks” who attend the wedding, and his deadpan delivery of earnest-sounding vows turn Southern domestic life into something both ritualistic and unfamiliar, making the local feel as distant as the Balkans. In both abandoned anthem and completed wedding song, Newman is poking fun at the mythologies people build around place. He’s showing how nationalism and regional identity rest on invented narratives of purity, struggle, and romance.
In that sense, “A Wedding in Cherokee County” is neither Albanian nor Southern. It’s Newman’s own invented landscape—somewhere between Tirana and Tuscaloosa—where irony and sincerity coexist uncomfortably. It’s a place where a sexually insecure bridegroom, who worries his wife will laugh at his “mighty sword,” stands in for an entire culture’s mythologized awkwardness with emotion and masculinity, and where the imagined enemy isn’t communism or capitalism, but the tired narratives we use to make sense of identity, place, and power.
And what started as an “Albanian anthem” becomes, in the end, a low point in “rock and roll bad taste,” as Newman once called it, only to sing it anyway, straight-faced, with aching tenderness.10
Despite what Newman says in live performances, “A Wedding in Cherokee County” isn’t about Albania. It’s about how we imagine places we don’t understand. It’s about how nationalism, whether Balkan or Southern, often relies on myths that blur the line between pride and parody.11 And it’s about a songwriter trying, earnestly and absurdly, to make art out of that confusion.
Sometimes, historical sources hide in the most unexpected places—not in official records or historical repositories, but in stage banter, in an obscure track on a concept album, or in the cultural afterlife of an abandoned anthem for a country that never asked for one. Newman’s flirtation with Communist Albania didn’t yield an anthem, but it left behind a revealing Cold War artifact. By tracing its journey, we’re reminded that sources of historical insight aren’t always grand or conventional. At times they come wrapped in absurdity, half-finished songs, or off-hand jokes from a piano bench. And in that sense, Newman’s so-called Albanian wedding song isn’t just a cultural curiosity. It’s a case study in how humor, music, and imagination can become unexpected gateways into the past—a reminder that even the strangest cultural leftovers can offer insight into their moment in history.
- Randy Newman, “A Wedding in Cherokee County,” on Live from Seattle 1974, released 2020, streaming audio, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/6JwaliyNPkWrb93CtxXpd2?si=5548a852fbaf4a81.
- Miranda Vickers, The Albanians: A Modern History (I.B. Tauris, 2001), 185–191.
- Grover Lewis, “Is Randy Newman a Redneck Cole Porter—Or Just Strange?” Playboy 22, no. 11 (November 1975), 144, 178. Full text available via The Stacks Reader, http://www.thestacksreader.com/is-randy-newman-a-redneck-cole-porter-or-just-strange/; Randy Newman, “A Wedding in Cherokee County (Berlin, 1994),” YouTube, February 28, 2011, video, 3:05, https://youtu.be/Yhd63GWElDo?si=yOuBG9k2iefl82eA.
- Vickers, The Albanians, 185–191.
- Lewis, “Is Randy Newman a Redneck Cole Porter—Or Just Strange?” Playboy, 144, 178.
- Randy Newman, “A Wedding in Cherokee County (1977-11-07 Madison WI),” YouTube, August 6, 2021, video, 3:24, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zf281kzif6s.
- Tom W. Smith, “The Polls: American Attitudes Toward the Soviet Union and Communism,” The Public Opinion Quarterly 47, no. 2 (1983): 277–92; Bekim Sejdiu and Lulzim Peci, “Engaging with the Self-Captive Nation: Albania in the US Official Documents from 1945 to 1980,” Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 18, no. 1 (2017): 87–106.
- Randy Newman, “Johnny Cutler’s Birthday – Randy Newman,” YouTube, October 7, 2023, video, 41:47, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cN15bppefQ. Note: the “Albanian National Anthem” begins at 36:05.
- Grover Lewis, “Is Randy Newman a Redneck Cole Porter—Or Just Strange?” Playboy 22, no. 11 (November 1975), 144, 178.
- Randy Newman, “Albanian Wedding Song – Live 1977,” on The Life for Me, released 2025, streaming audio, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/7kF34eiU8xIS8ASa9AYozQ?si=57662f29b9ce4882.
- Michaelis N. Michael, “History, Myth and Nationalism: The Retrospective Force of National Roles within a Myth-Constructed Past,” in Nationalism in the Troubled Triangle: Cyprus, Greece, and Turkey, ed. Ayhan Aktar, Niyazi Kızılyürek, and Umut Özkırımlı (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 149-159.
