The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down

“The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” is a song written by Robbie Robertson and originally recorded by the Canadian-American roots rock group The Band in 1969 and released on their eponymous second album. Levon Helm provided the lead vocals. The song is a first-person narrative relating the economic and social distress experienced by the protagonist, a poor white Southerner, during the last year of the American Civil War, when George Stoneman was raiding southwest Virginia. The song appeared at number 245 on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 greatest songs of all time. Joan Baez’s version peaked at #3 on the Hot 100 on 2 October 1971; it did likewise on the Cashbox Top 100 chart. However, on the Record World Top Singles chart for the week of September 25, 1971, the Baez single hit #1 for one week. The song was written by Robbie Robertson, who spent about eight months working on it. Robertson said he had the music to the song in his head and would play the chords over and over on the piano but had no idea what the song was to be about. Then the concept came to him and he researched the subject with help from the Band’s drummer Levon Helm, a native of Arkansas.[3][2] In his 1993 autobiography, This Wheel’s on Fire, Helm wrote, “Robbie and I worked on ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’ up in Woodstock. I remember taking him to the library so he could research the history and geography of the era and make General Robert E. Lee come out with all due respect.”The lyrics tell of the last days of the American Civil War, portraying the suffering of the protagonist, Virgil Caine, a poor white Southerner. Dixie is the historical nickname for the states making up the Confederate States of America. The song’s opening stanza refers to one of George Stoneman’s raids behind Confederate lines attacking the railroads of Danville, Virginia, at the end of the Civil War in 1865. “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” is considered one of the highlights of The Band, the group’s second album, which was released in the fall of 1969. According to Rob Bowman’s liner notes to the 2000 reissue of The Band, the album has been viewed as a concept album, with the songs focusing on the peoples, places and traditions associated with an older version of Americana. The Band frequently performed the song in concert, and it is included on the group’s live albums Rock of Ages (1972) and Before the Flood (1974). The song also was included in the Band’s Thanksgiving Day concert in 1976 which was the subject of Martin Scorsese’s documentary film The Last Waltz. The song also appears on the film’s soundtrack album as well as on the group’s second box set, A Musical History and their double-disk collection of hits, To Kingdom Come. The last time the song was performed by Helm was in The Last Waltz. Helm refused to play the song afterwards. Although it has long been believed that the reason for Helm’s refusal to play the song was a dispute with Robertson over songwriting credits, according to Garth Hudson the refusal was due to Helm’s dislike for Joan Baez’s version