Night They Drove Old Dixie Down

[struggle4progress]

I once wondered why Joan Baez, one of the great political singers of the left, recorded this -- but I finally concluded Joan's politics have always been rooted in a genuine sympathy for other people, whether they agreed with her or not

[HassleCat]

1. Too sympathetic to the rebels?

I prefer to think most southerners were suckered into going along with the confederate propaganda, much the same as most of our legislators were suckered into going along with the Iraq invasion.

[struggle4progress]

3. Only a pawn in their game

[libdem4life]

26. I'm reccing the song and your tagline. Either it's new or I haven't noticed. i was still in

high school and a Republican like my family. But to see and hear Bob Dylan at that age...kind of my age...what a treat in my older age. Thanks S4P.

[jwirr]

6. Especially those who fought for the confederacy and we not slave holders. They had no stake in

the game.

[lumberjack_jeff]

2. It was written by a Canadian. nt

[WorseBeforeBetter]

14. Wasn't Arkansan Levon Helm involved somehow? (n/t)

[spanone]

16. written by robbie robertson.....canadian

the story was probably lifted from levon since they played in 'The Band'

robbie wrote most of the band's original material

[WorseBeforeBetter]

17. That I know about Robertson. I thought I heard somewhere that Levon was...

a big part of the historical research that helped him pen the song. Regardless, it's powerful... Robertson's lyrics and Helm's delivery.

[spanone]

18. levon was raised in the south/arkansas ....historical research for a song is called a co-writer

robbie had none of that.

i read levon's book and he was pretty bitter about it....


it is a powerful song and levon was one of our greatest voices

[Major Nikon]

34. He was involved in that the song was written for him to sing

But I don't believe he was involved in the actual writing of the song.

[msongs]

4. its about whiners who started a war and lost and can't get over it. catchy tho nt

[Elwood P Dowd]

5. Nice Technics SL-1500 turntable with a Stanton 600 series cartridge playing it.

Better than average rig back in the day.

[Gloria]

7. I loved The Band's version

Eom

[WorseBeforeBetter]

15. That's my preferred version.

It really is a beautiful, passionate song, and I say that as a native Pennsylvanian. Such raw emotion...

[Gloria]

20. The enitre album is just something I still love

I have my original copy, scratches and all, an put it on once in awhile on one of those "consoles" they sell now...awful, I know, but at my age, my Garrad 40B turntable is long gone!! As is my Panasonic Technics and the big speakers.....
Even this live version seems to lose a lot of that album's soulfulness...

[kentuck]

23. I still have my Pioneer turntable...

and a lot of old albums, some of them scratched pretty good. This is one of my favorites by the Band:

[Journeyman]

8. A complicated, emotional tune about a difficult, conflicted era -- it can be seen as anti-war. . .

as much as a Confederate lament. I don't have time to discuss it as I would like, but here's an interesting, conglomerate discussion, focused more on The Band's original version, but detailing Baez's take on the tune as well.

http://theband.hiof.no/articles/dixie_viney.html

And here's a little something to help you truly question the meaning and intent of this song:

[kentuck]

12. What a great version!

Of a great song.

I had not heard that one before.

[Journeyman]

28. Havens could cover anyone's song it seemed, even a signature piece, and make it his own . . .

I thought no one could improve on Springsteen, especially an iconic piece like "Streets of Philadelphia," and then One Step Up/Two Steps Back brought us this:

So much raw emotion and empathetic pain in four short minutes. I tear up every time I hear it, remembering vividly the pain of loss even though I've never known an Andy Beckett.

[struggle4progress]

13. +

Excellent!

[Cassidy1]

9. Somebody posted this link in another thread, and I thought it worthy of reposting.

http://harvardpress.typepad.com/hup_publicity/2012/04/the-night-they-drove-old-dixie-down.html

In Mystery Train, his classic work of rock criticism and American cultural analysis, Greil Marcus described the song as being less about the Civil War than about “the way each American carries a version of that event within himself.” That description conjures Robert Penn Warren’s claim that the Civil War is America’s only “felt” history, “history lived in our national imagination.” And it rightly situates “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” as an important reflection of popular memory of the Civil War.

More from Marcus’s Mystery Train:

It is hard for me to comprehend how any Northerner, raised on a very different war than Virgil Kane’s, could listen to this song without finding himself changed. You can’t get out from under the singer’s truth—not the whole truth, but his truth—and the little autobiography closes the gap between us. The performance leaves behind a feeling that for all our oppositions, every American still shares this old event; because to this day none of us has escaped its impact, what we share is an ability to respond to a story like this one.

I always think about the meaning of books, songs, etc. The three things I ask are 1) What does it say?; 2) What does it mean?; and 3) What does it mean to me? This could be one of those songs. I see the same in the song I Don't Like Mondays. Obviously a very different song, but one that sums up a situation with the hopeless lament that sometimes things are going to happen, and that there are no reasons or reasons that are going to be beyond your control no matter what you do.

Robertson was from Canada, and had this real fascination with the American South. He actually went to the library to do research for the song.

[arely staircase]

10. a haunting but typically inpenetrateable REM song

[cemaphonic]

11. The idea for the song came from Robbie Robertson hearing "the South will rise again"

several times while traveling in the South. He thought it was funny at first, but on reflection, picked up on the sense of pain and loss in the expression.

[cwydro]

19. It's a great song.

Period.

[daleo]

21. All the bells were ringing

All the people were singing.

Those lines make it sound more like a celebration, than a lament over a loss.

You can't raise a Caine when he's in defeat.

Those speak to me about someone realizing the futility of war and of the cause.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

22. I have empathy for the conscripts. I have no empathy for folks who would kill to own other folks.

Love The Band.

[Sam_Fields]

25. It's an anti-war song from the prospective of the south.

Now, I don't mind chopping wood
And I don't care if the money's no good
You take what you need
And you leave the rest
But they should never
Have taken the very best

In this case Dixie only refers to the South and not the confederate Flag.

[marions ghost]

29. Right

anti-war in general.

[libdem4life]

27. Did Cher do a version of this song...I keep thinking of her as I hear the other renditions.

[struggle4progress]

30. Mebbe. Dunno. I've lost track cuz so many folk have covered it

[fishwax]

31. I think the prevailing sentiment is more anti-war than lost cause lament.

There is a mournfulness to it, to be sure, but it doesn't strike me as a mourning for the south so much as a mourning of the tangible effects of the war on the populace. The song opens with the destruction of infrastructure and widespread hunger and suffering and ends with the personal loss of a relative in battle. There's no glorification of or attempt to rally sympathy for the southern cause. There is a mention of Robert E. Lee, but it's isolated and without context (and, incidentally, historically impossible, since Lee was apparently never in Tennessee after the war).

As for the song's relationship to confederate politics, I think that, given the role that brotherhood plays in the Civil War's cultural role, I think the narrator's name (Virgil Caine/Cain/Kane) is significant. Virgil, of course, was Dante's guide through Hell, while Cain is the bad brother in Genesis's tale of fratricide. And while Robbie Robertson was fascinated and inspired by repeatedly hearing the old "south will rise again" refrain from old timers in the south, the end of the song forecloses such possibility: "You can't raise a Cain back up when it's in defeat."

[cemaphonic]

32. I think that the "Robert E Lee" in the song refers to the steamboat rather than the general.

And I pretty much agree with your take on the song. Just a poor farmer/soldier trying to come to grips with the destruction and loss of war.

[fishwax]

33. I think you're probably right about that too

I always kind of thought I heard a "the" before "Robert E. Lee," which would suggest the steamboat.

[Major Nikon]

35. At the time it was written, the US was bombing the living shit out of Vietnam

The idea was to get southerners to empathize with the perils of scorched earth war policies and the effects they have on those in which they are imposed.