Driving Dixie Down

As a historian of slavery and abolitionism, I have never considered using “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” for one of my Saturday music posts. It’s a beautiful song, with haunting vocal renditions by Levon Helm and Joan Baez, among others, but nostalgia for the Confederacy ruins it for me. The idealization of the “Lost Cause” has done tremendous harm in American politics. Although the song is not as offensive as Confederate flag waving, or veneration of Nathan Bedford Forrest and Jefferson Davis, it still serves to soften the image of the Confederacy as something other than what it was – treason in defense of slavery.

Recently, however, I have slightly reconsidered. A couple of weeks ago, the Alabama singer-songwriter Early James performed “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” in a tribute show to The Band’s Last Waltz. Well aware that the song has been regarded as a Confederate anthem, ill-suited in the current anti-racist moment, Early re-wrote the lyrics to eliminate reverence for the Confederacy.

“I hope we piss off the right people by changing these words,” he said when he introduced the number on a Nashville stage. Instead of “a time I remember Oh so well,” Early substituted “a time to bid farewell.” And he changed the very title, and chorus, to “tonight, we drive old Dixie down.” The most important change was in the closing verse:

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.

“The lines that made me cringe, I had to change those,” James said in an interview with Rolling Stone. “I’m from the South. I grew up with racist family members. The song just kind of wrote itself.” 

The Band’s Robbie Robertson, who wrote the song, has tried to distance himself from the Confederate implications. A half-Jewish and half-First Nations (Mohawk and Cayuga) Canadian, Robertson explained in a radio interview that he just wanted to write a great song for his Arkansan bandmate Levon Helm, “I was trying to write a song that I thought Levon could sing better than anybody in the world. That’s all it was. That’s what it meant to me.”

Writing on Slate, the music critic Jack Hamilton suggests there is more to it than that. “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” has to be understood in the context of the late 1960s, he explains. Released at the height of the anti-Vietnam War protests, it is actually a song about “the devastation of war as experienced from the losing side [and] with the possible exception of the line “They should never have taken the very best” (an ambiguous they that could refer to either the Confederate war machine or the Union army) . . . there’s not much in the song that rings as an explicit endorsement of the Confederacy.”

Hamilton makes a good point. Even the refrain – “all the bells were ringing/all the people were singing” – could refer as easily to a celebration as a dirge.

Hamilton goes on, however, to cite C. Vann Woodward’s observation “that the American South was unique in being the only part of the United States to have experienced military defeat, and thus might be uniquely suited” to offer some insight into the devastation of war.  I cannot speak for Woodward, but Hamilton should have known better. Native Americans experienced military defeat all across the continent, and in far more devastating fashion than the rebels in Tennessee. Robbie Robertson knew that full well, having often spent time with his mother on the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario.

Well, I do see that the song is ambiguous, as art so often is. Hamilton concludes that “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” does not have much in common with Dixie, Gone with the Wind, or “any number of countless other American fictions that glamorize Southern slavery.” Fair enough, but I still won’t use it for a Saturday music post.

Comments

[Johnny Canuck]

Greetings from a Canuck.

You will watch statues of Lincoln, Jefferson, and Washington - racists all - follow suit presently. Your appeals to their virtues (and simply being men of their times who nonetheless brought about the framework for liberty and equality which otherwise would not have been made manifest) will fall on deaf ears.

Your current divided house will not stand.

You also omit mention of First Nations people who fought against the North, thinking - and not completely without merit - that their chances for liberty would be better than under Union yolk.

Robbie is from Ontario, a province settled originally by United Empire Loyalists and former British soldiers who fought your treasonous Continental army. Have you considered that he, they, and we, thought YOU to be traitors, and that the South - albeit for immoral reasons - had every right to secede from your empirical social contract only 80 years later, per the 10th Amendment - (lies presented in Texas v White notwithstanding - I felt obliged, as a Canadian, to get "notwithstanding" in there)? Why should anyone care about your claims of fidelity or treason? It's not as though you produced the more just or fair society. The Union won decisively and controlled the country for a century thereafter.

[anon]

Canuck:

The "North" was just as, if not more racist than the South. The ghettos in the Northern cities, e.g. Harlem, Roxbury, the South Side of Chicago, etc. etc. were created by racist, white Northerners. The reaction in Boston, for example, to busing was especially disgusting.

Joe Biden? Well, ask his running mate about that.

Yet, it is the "liberal" northerners who are especially condemning of the "South." Lincoln asked for there to be "malice toward none" but, for these folks, hating and condemning others is a way of life.

The intellectual legatees of the Northern bigots who created the Northern ghettos are the "liberals" of today. They are just as prejudiced as any others. In fact, one of the ironies of the current movements is an effort to teach these self righteous "liberals" that, for all their virtue signaling and posturing, they mostly live in cushy, segregated neighborhoods, send their kids to the "right schools" and avoid the kind of political action that would foster real progress in the ghettos maintained and governed by their "liberal" political allies.

Lubet condemns a song. He seems to prefer a version that would spit on the graves of the dead Confederate soldiers. That's par for the course these days.

But, what of all his fellow baby boomers, who have been signing along for all these years, with tears for the Confederacy's fallen.

What perhaps Lubet doesn't understand is that death from war is death from war, and the true "liberal" grieves for the death of those who are sent to fight and die by "liberals" and "conservatives" alike.

[Johnny Canuck]

Every Canadian visitor to the Yank North (and we go regularly) knows this.

It's part of the reason why, whenever a Republican wins the presidency and the Dems threaten to run away to Canada, most Canadians shudder in horror at the prospect of their mass emigration.

[anon]

Canuck

Every state that surrounds California fears the same thing (known as "Californication"). Folks in Florida fear the New Yorkers ("snowbirds") fleeing to their State as well.

Hating on Dixie makes the Northern "liberal" feel better than other people. This is the core attribute of the modern "liberal." (Read Maureen Dowd's last column.)

This is the reason it is so risible to hear Biden's spew about how he didn't go to an "Ivy League school" but that "Nobody is better than me." He has been hanging out with the East Coast liberal establishment for so long, even he has had enough of their snobbery and elitism and posturing.

C'mon man.