The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down

From The Band's second album, entitled The Band, Levon Helm singing "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down":



The Band rose to fame in the late 1960s as the back-up band (hence the name) for Bob Dylan. When Dylan was injured in a motorcycle accident, they holed up in a house in Woodstock, New York, waiting for Dylan's recovery. While they were waiting, they began writing and recording music that came out on their first two albums, Music from Big Pink and The Band

"They Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" proved to be a vary popular title from their catalogue, and has been covered by artists as diverse as Joan Baez and The Black Crowes. The song is somewhat unique, in part because it is unusual for a pop song to atttempt to deal with a historical event like the end of the Civil War. Robbie Robertson (possibly with some assistance from Levon Helm), actually did some historical research when writing the lyrics for this song.

Virgil Caine is the name, and I served on the Danville train,
Til Stoneman's cavalry came and tore up the tracks again

The Richmond and Danville Railroad was the most important transportation link for the Confederacy during the war, and was destroyed by a siege led by General George Stoneman.

In the winter of '65
We were hungry, just barely alive

The song is particularly touching in its detailing of the suffering of people in the South during the war.

By May the 10th, Richmond had fell
It's a time I remember, oh so well

As do native Southerners, to this day. To quote the Mississippi novelist William Faulkner, "The past is never dead. It isn't even in the past."

In the second verse of the song, things get a little more complicated:

Back with my wife in Tennessee,
When one day she called to me
"Virgil, quick come see,
There goes Robert E. Lee"

Except Lee was never in East Tennessee during the war. East Tennessee, along with other areas in Appalachia, were also hotbeds of anti-Confederate sentiment, largely based on their animosity to slaveholders.

Now I don't mind chopping wood
And I don't care if the money's no good

References the had work that poor whites were forced to endure to make ends meet, and the inflation that the states' rights, hard money South suffered when they began printing greenbacks. The Confederate government also was the first to institute a conscription act.

You take what you need,
and you leave the rest.
But they never should have taken the very best.

The Confederate government also authorized the army to seize private property to support the war effort.

Like my father before me, I will work the land
Like my brother above me, who took a rebel stand.
Just eighteen, proud and brave,
But a Yankee laid him in his grave
I swear by the mud below my feet
You can't raise a Caine
Back up when he's in defeat

This verse deals, in my view, with the perception of the continued impoverishment of the South after the war.

"The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" also does not deal with the major causes of the war--namely, slavery.



This song was also covered by a folk singer from Brooklyn names Richie Havens, who puts a little different spin on the recording--because the defeat of the Confederacy has a little different meaning for him.