Song of the Day 8/16: The Band, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”

Does “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” glorify the Lost Cause? Is it racist? Rolling Stone magazine suddenly thinks so. After praising it for 50 years as a classic of the rock era, the magazine last week published a story in which writer Simon Vozick-Levinson calls it a “troubling requiem for the Confederate cause” and “a vehicle for a harmful, racist American myth.”

The author offers no supporting evidence for these claims. He’s making them to puff up the case of a country singer-songwriter named Early James, who caused a stir at the annual Last Waltz Tribute in Nashville early this month by bowdlerizing the song.

Among other changes, James rewrote the last verse to read:

Unlike my father before me, who I will never understand
Unlike the others below me, who took a rebel stand
Depraved and powered to enslave
I think it’s time we laid hate in its grave
I swear by the mud below my feet
That monument won’t stand, no matter how much concrete

I don’t have much problem with the rewritten lyrics; if Early James wants to show the world that he’s a pale imitation of Robbie Robertson, have at it. My problem is the brazen revisionism by the publisher — the piece never acknowledges all the praise the magazine’s writers have heaped on the song over the decades.

It’s true that a subset of Southerners misinterprets the song as a requiem for the Lost Cause. That’s what prompted James, a white man from Alabama, to rewrite a good bit of it to reflect the current mood, which requires demonizing not just the Confederacy but anything that even tangentially brushes against it. This leads to wrong-headed displays of wokeness, of the sort that condemns “Huckleberry Finn” because it uses the n-word without acknowledging its larger project of rejecting racism.

As evidence that this is a misreading, let’s note that Joan Baez, whose cover reached No. 3 on the US singles chart in 1971, is the daughter of an immigrant and about as liberal a performer as you can imagine. Black soul singer Dobie Gray performed an emotional version of it in concert, changing a very few words (he does not say “my” brother, and says “they,” not a Yankee, laid him in his grave). They all are now on the hook for having sung a song that revisionists now claim is “problematic.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote briefly about the song back in 2009, dismissing it as “the pharaoh’s blues.” It’s a facile interpretation, but at least Coates is brave enough to acknowledge that the problem isn’t the song, it’s him. “I’m told that it’s a great song,” he wrote in the Atlantic, “and I don’t so much doubt this, as I doubt my own magnanimity.” I understand completely his unwillingness to empathize with a poor dirt farmer who lost everything dear to him by taking a rebel stand. Coates says his empathy has limits, but to his credit, Coates seems to understand that it’s possible to hate the racism that led to the Civil War and still sympathize with the poor Southerners who were drafted to fight it, even if he himself can’t do it. He tried, he failed, and he didn’t take his failure as proof that the song was at fault.

That’s because any analysis of Virgil Caine’s tale claiming that it is an elegy for the Confederacy is going to look in vain for evidence in the lyrics (it’s an oddity of this song that nobody except Levon Helm has ever sung it exactly as it appears on the copyrighted lyric sheet). It’s simply not there. Robertson, a Canadian, like the rest of the Band except for Helm, said one of the inspirations for the song was a talk he had with Helm’s father, who told him the South would rise again. Yet the song’s narrator says no such thing — he says “you can’t raise a Caine back up when he’s in defeat.”

You know what song Rolling Stone had no words of condemnation for? Lynyrd Skynyrd’s classic-rock staple, “Sweet Home Alabama,” which actually praises then-Alabama Gov. George Wallace in its lyrics.

In Birmingham they love the Governor,
Now we all did what we could do
Now Watergate does not bother me
Does your conscience bother you? Tell the truth

I have not allowed that song to be played in my presence for decades. If it comes on the radio, I switch stations. If a band covers it live, I leave the venue. I notice that Early James hasn’t rewritten that verse yet, and Rolling Stone hasn’t seen fit to call it “problematic.”

Granted, a Last Waltz concert doesn’t give James the platform to address Lynyrd Skynyrd, but there’s an entire branch of rock music, and an even larger one in country music, that glorifies the South and through it the Confederacy. It seems to me there are hundreds, if not thousands, of songs that cry out for censure far louder than “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” Where’s the call for cancelling or revising that body of material?

I’ll let Dobie Gray, live at the Volunteer Jam in 1980, have the last word.