From "Fifty Years of 'The Band,' an Album that Didn't Fit the Mold Then or Now" (Billboard).
Here, you can listen to the "Last Waltz" performance of "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down." This much-up-voted comment is more enlightening than Billboard's dumb explanation for dummies (that the song isn't "a strict endorsement" of America's "thorny past"):
---I was a young urban Black kid going to a suburban school. A White friend played this for me in his car. On a cassette.I remember — as a college student — staring at that picture on album cover, listening to the music, and feeling like the men had magically arrived from the past and were bringing us song stories from the 19th century. It wasn't easy, in 1969, to look up who they actually were and why they were singing like this. You just had the music and the notions and images that arose in your mind. These were so powerful to me that I don't really like to read the true story now. The experience of the art was already everything.
----I almost cried right there, because the level of pain and stress in the lyrics. As a Northerner they did not teach us anything about the aftermath of that war.
------Forgive me, but I thought Levon was Black. Just the grit, power and Southern soul in his voice.
2018------It still moves me to tears. Absolutely the best history lesson of the post Civil War South.
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75 comments:
Interesting. I never heard of The Band, but liked their music, until 1978. I always thought they were Blood Sweat and Tears
As a northerner I have always been informed to the devastation that was the Civil War. Complete and total devastation. If that has stopped being taught in public schools, it's a crime on par with the destruction of the Civil War. 640,000 soldiers died. That is a number that should render you silent, for a moment every time you come across it.
And Gone With the Wind was a mainly a
Report of eye witnesses. Sherman practiced total war.
I just learned of a tribute band, playing next month at the DC City Winery (a good, personal venue). From the promo materials.
https://citywinery.com/winegarden/thethebandband101119.html?cwref=1
If you like THE BAND, you'll love The THE BAND Band! They are the only nationally touring band dedicated exclusively to the accurate reproduction of The Band's music, bringing it to life with authentic, true-to-form renditions of their extraordinary repertoire.
From hit songs such as "The Weight," "Up On Cripple Creek," and "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" and deep cuts from The Band’s classic albums, to the historic collaborations with Bob Dylan, The THE BAND Band delivers with the passion and commitment for which The Band was renowned. Experience the power and excitement of those legendary concerts, as famously documented in the Martin Scorsese film, The Last Waltz.
‘Til Stoneman’s cavalry came and tore up the tracks again.
The man was there, right?
I agonize over things with a Confederate perspective everyday. It’s, well, really agonizing. Then I agonize about climate change or my privilege of some damn thing.
The Band was steampunk before it was hip and commercialized. I find their expression of antiquarian American sensibilities more authentic than most of the folk revival singers from the scene Dylan emerged from, and I like their music a lot more, even if they're part Canadian.
"...a particular type of humanity and heartbreak that’s increasingly hard to reckon with, given that its foundation lies within the perspective of a Confederate." Who -- as all good people know -- were inhuman monsters, just like Nazis.
Highly recommend Levon Helm's book on the Band, Wheels on Fire.
Apparently Levon Helm was so disillusioned with the success of Joan Baez' mangled version of their song that he stopped performing it in the early 70s.
They were one of the great bands of an era filled with great bands (as opposed to today's music: who's going to remember any of the hot bands of today? Who's going to be hearing those tunes or lyrics in their heads like we can from the music of our era?)
They had a unique, real sound. They were consummate musicians and songwriters. And there's not been a voice like Levon Helm's since cancer took his voice and life away. Late in his life he performed with various musicians at The Barn in Woodstock, NY. I remember seeing (or hearing?) him perform music from his last album on Don Imus' radio/tv show about 10 or so years ago. He was in late stages by then, still performing at The Barn to raise money for his medical needs. Heard multiple interviews with him. He was a good man.
Boy...yesterday Robert Hunter. Today Cat Stevens and The Band. What's next?
Thanks for this. Good stuff ... and a welcome change of pace.
"The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" is a great classic, still very moving after all these years.
I've read a lot about wars--WWII, Nam, the Revolution, Thucydides-- but none cause me the heartache of histories of the War Between the States. There is still something so ineffably sad about it, even after all these years. I don't know why, my ancestors arrived here a generation after it was over.
Currently reading the Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant.
It wasn't easy, in 1969, to look up who they actually were and why they were singing like this. You just had the music and the notions and images that arose in your mind.
I hadn't thought of that. I'm glad I got to experience songs without knowing their backstory. The mood the notes conjured, the lyrics, the album photos all created a visceral experience that's hard to describe and impossible to duplicate.
Reminds me of Stan Rogers and particularly his songs Northwest Passage and Barrett's Privateers, which sound like they are from 100 years ago or more. And if you're not familiar with Stan Rogers, go out and find his music now. You can thank me later.
My vote for the most painful "lost love" song ever:
"It Makes No Difference", by The Band, sung by Rick Danko. The imagery of his bewilderment and hurt is painful, his telling of it is heartbreaking.
https://youtu.be/fPEdguVxzZs
Thank You
Still powerful. In constant rotation. In the Last Waltz the Staple Singers were invited to sing on The Weight. How much more poignant if they had sang on The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down where the band recreated Father Abraham walking through the streets of Richmond at the end of tbe Civil War to sit in Jefferson Davis' chair in his presidential office as Richmond still smoldered and the newly freed Americans followed him singing hymnals - 🎶And the people were singing...🎶
People today increasingly speak and write about our country's past, our own country, as if it was a foreign land. And yet what are currently viewed as that foreign place's "sins" have somehow come through time and place to infect the current nation. It's as if the USA prior to their birth has no reality except as a vector of moral disease.
These comments remind me of the first time a saw "Gone With the Wind" as a third grader one Saturday in a Greenville, Mississippi theater in the late 1950s. Not a dry eye in the house.
The video you posted of "The Weight" was great. I couldn't help wondering, whether it was still permissible to play "The Night they Drove Old Dixie Down" given our current pc climate. Great song. I've read some great novels written by men where a woman was the protagonist and I found it hard to believe the writer was male. And vice versa. Some people have a good understanding and empathy. Why not with historical characters too?
Robbie Robertson was a superb songwriter. With The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, he wrote an enthralling song, packed with accurate historical details : "Danville Train" "Stoneman's cavalry". And then he got Levon Helm to sing it (with an authentic drawl), and, by God he sounds like Virgil Caine. Awesome song in every respect. A true classic.
BTW, Joan Baez had the hit record of the day with the tune, in which she unforgivably substituted "so much" for "Stoneman's". She didn't know what she had.
Now there's a band I can respect. And a classic song, thanks.
Since I've been tail-end charlie recently I'm hopping in early. The experience of defeat, even the vicarious experience of defeat, even in a tainted cause, is fertile ground for art.
IIRC Dylan spent a lot of time at the NYPL reading WABAWS-era microfilm newspapers--he was steeped in that era.
Narr
Recent-past American
The Civil War was a vast, terrible, necessary tragedy whose effects resonated down across time and cultures, like a bell of doom and redemption. But thanks to the Marxist indoctrination in schools, that bell has been silenced. "The Band" now has to be "explained" (meaning "explained away apologetically") to the current generation, through a Marxist filter that diminishes or (preferably) erases the past, so that the sense of history and connection that the musicians felt writing and performing those songs, and that Ann felt listening to them, is lost forever.
As Orwell warned, the ideal population for a totalitarian takeover is one that has been stripped of both past and future, and exists in a constant, uncertain, volatile present.
Job well done, educators! Your flock of ignorant zoo animals awaits your commands.
"You take what you need and you leave the rest
But they should never have taken the very best."
Nothing but net.
Sherman practiced total war.
I was dating an Irish Catholic girl from Chicago and we were going to Savannah for St. Patrick's Day. (they do it up right in Savannah)
I-16 roughly follows Sherman's March to the Sea. She kept seeing lonely chimneys sticking up in the air and asked me about them. I said that was what was left over after the Yankees burn down the houses that surrounded them.
Her stricken face told me she finally understood.
PS. I think that the first two albums from the Band are the equal of just about anything ever put down on vinyl.
Whispering Pines may be the most beautiful song ever on a pop record. When I think about Richard Manuel, I wish alcohol had never been invented.
The Joan Baez version is painful in the wrong kind of way.
i've always like that song;
Even though it was a song about Traitors, It was a song about Traitors weeping and wailing
“no terms with rebels with arms in their hands — my terms are unconditional and immediate surrender!”
"Damn you gentlemen, I see skulkers, I'll have none here. Come on, you volunteers, come on. You volunteered to be killed for love of country, and now you can be. You are only damned volunteers. I'm only a soldier, and don't want to be killed, but you came to be killed and now you can be."
both quotes, Brig Gen CF Smith, 1862
Phidippus, IIRC Tony Horowitz in Confederates in the Attic wrote that his own interest in the Civil War was sparked by his grandfather, an immigrant from well after the conflict. I understand the impulse. I recently found myself tearing up over the death of a Song Dynasty general.
According to Grant's telling, Stoneman's cavalry expedition was in a different direction and an utter disaster. Should have been Sheridan's cavalry, I think, although I'm no expert, but he's the guy who knocked out the Danville Train shortly before Richmond fell. But pretty accurate for a Canadian.
William Jamieson: Agreed. Another great one.
"And the rain beats down on my door."
I watched the "Last Waltz" again not too long ago, and while I liked some of the songs, especially "The Night They Drove Ol' Dixie Down", I thought that the director was far too indulgent of his subjects, and the performances, especially by some of the guest musicians, were just phoned in.
I'd also like remind us all that Ol' Time Lefty Joan Baez herself did a cover of The Night They Drove Ol' Dixie Down. It wasn't that long ago that the Left actually had sympathy for both the American folk experience, white & black, & for the historical suffering of the white proletariat.
I was 11 years old when "The Band" came out and still remember hearing "Up on Cripple Creek" on the AM radio. It sounded different than anything else on at the time and just jumped out of my mom's car radio speaker. One of my best memories of her, singing along with the radio.
Baez's "Dixie" was not a favorite, but it had an impact on me anyway. My neighbor, a couple of years older and grown out of AM radio, played me the Band album (and then Abbey Road). I switched over to the FM "hippie station" and never looked back.
Howard,
I always liked the Band but was never in danger of confusing them with blood sweat and tears. I loved child is father to the man.
I was always more of anAl Kooper fan from his Blues Project days up to his more current work. Bst went to shit when he left. Spinning wheel? That's the best they could do after AL?
I read yesterday, in Rolling Stone? That The Weight is the best R&R song ever. I like it a lot but best ever? Not sure about that.
As for Dixie, find Joan Baez take on it. I have it on an album from 73 or so. Great as the band's versionis, it is weak tea next to hers.
John Henry
I was always bothered by this error. eg poetic license
"Back with my wife in Tennessee
And one day she said to me
"Virgil, quick! Come see
There goes Robert E. Lee"
Lee commanded the Army of Northern Virginia. I know of no record of him ever being in Tennessee, during that period.
but it rhymes
Baez by 2 lengths
Hop on here! Night They drove Old Dixie Down is sympathetic to the south. Thus it is EVIL AND RACISSSSS! ALL VINYL AND CDs of theBandmust be destroyed and purged fromthexinterwebs. All Confederate statues out be bliterated and allcgraves dug up s th remains going into garbage dumps. 're-ducation camps for all honkies.
Chris Shifflett has a great podcast called Walking The Floor. Mainly interviews with country (eg merle haggard) and semi-country (eg Steve Earle)
He recently did a great interview with Robbie Robertson.
John Henry
The Band was something I had heard of (born in '62) but was never really on my radar. Don't know why. I listened to a ton of AoR in the 1970s but I don't even remember them being played or mentioned. Seen parts of Last Waltz and liked it but. . . .I dunno. Never caught my fancy for some reason.
Off to make a new Pandora station. . . . .
Dutch Canuck.
Disagree with you about the war between the states being necessary.
We needed to end slavery of course, which is sold as the main cause of the war.
Slavery went from universal around the world in 1800 to extremely rare in 1900.
We are the only ones who ha a war. We could have found another way.
We still, 150 years later are suffering from the evil of that war.
John Henry
Robertson is continuing in that vein by presenting disparate musicians from many cultures. The Weight updated.
I don't think Bob has found a better backup sound than The Band.
Lee commanded the Army of Northern Virginia. I know of no record of him ever being in Tennessee, during that period.
Isn't it "There goes THE Robert E. Lee," maybe referring to a ship or something?
The Drill SGT said...
I was always bothered by this error. eg poetic license
"Back with my wife in Tennessee And one day she said to me "Virgil, quick! Come see
There goes Robert E. Lee"
I'd Always assumed that she said;
There goes THE <(Steamboat) Robert E Lee
But i see that the "lyrics" of the song, don't have the The
That album is, in my opinion, the best The Band ever recording by far. Not a single weak track; it's one masterpiece after another. And to join in the (deserved) pile-on of the Joan Baez version, she also mangles the lyric "Virgil quick come see, There goes Robert E. Lee", adding 'the' before Robert E. Lee and turning it into a song about a damn steamboat
I was listening to Mark Knopfler's song about Sonny Liston today - hadn't heard it in many many years. Reminds me of Dixie/Down in a lot of ways.
Here is a newer version - MK's voice is not what it was, but it doesn't hurt this tune: https://youtu.be/5DMLnoyk6R0
-XC
The line, "...there goes the Robert E. Lee" referred to seeing a steamboat on the Tennessee river.
A brilliant Illinois trial lawyer gets all the credit, but the day Dixie's slaves were actually freed was the Day an Army of midwestern farmers sent south by an Ohio man named U. S. Grant and Commanded by an Ohio man named Tecumseh Sherman out flanked Atlanta at Jonesboro, Georgia after a battle on August 30 and 31, 1864. That news effectively re-elected the Republican Abraham Lincoln over the Democrat John McClellan.
After waiting in Atlanta six weeks for hogs to be killed and put in smokehouses, the Army of the Cumberland left a burned down town and reappeared 5 weeks later having eaten all the food along a wide path and being followed by freed slaves the whole way. The starvation of civilians was why Sherman was hated in Georgia...that and humiliating the Confederate Army.
@The Drill SGT
I think it's the Robert E Lee, a steamboat built in 1866 that plied the Mississippi.
Never caught my fancy for some reason
The Band is second only to the Beatles on my list.
While the "brown" album (their eponymously named second album) is more approachable, their first, "Music From Big Pink" sets the tone what made them different. Unlike every pop/rock album before it (which usually opens with an air ready radio hit) , it opens with a slow dirge. Not only is it a lament with Dylan supplying the words, but has something I had never heard before. Mournful, heart aching DRUMS. How can drums be mournful? Tears Of Rage will make you a believer.
Hemingway (not one of my faves, but when you're right you're right) said that every war, no matter how necessary or justified, is still a crime.
The most recent scholarly figure is some 750k dead. Mostly military, and most of them by disease not combat, but it's a big number for a civilized war--which it was, for the most part.
The degree of Sherman's destruction specifically in TMTS has been exaggerated in the popular mind but large parts of the South were devastated and destitute even without official hard-war policies. Other large portions of the South--even in SC--have been depopulated by hard times and changes since: not every lone chimneystack is Yankee vandalism.
I always heard the line as "come see the Robert E. Lee" as in the famous steamboat--that would fit the Tennessee context anyway.
Narr
Don't get me started on GWTW grrrr
"Slavery went from universal around the world in 1800 to extremely rare in 1900.
We are the only ones who ha a war. We could have found another way."
All the English-speaking colonies became independent nations without fighting a war. Americans were just in a hurry.
The Band was head and shoulders above their contemporaries in their ability to tell stories in their songs and the chops each member possessed were second to none. And Rick Danko... man, that plaintive sound and phrasing of the vocal in “It Makes No Difference” is pure soul.
John Henry, you would enjoy the book "Arguing About Slavery." It explains why we ended up where we did.
"Hop on here! Night They drove Old Dixie Down is sympathetic to the south."
Is it? This (PNW) Yankee always thought it was about the ruin to be found in vanity. Hard to imagine The Band bumping the Glorious Cause.
If the Band song about Dixie leaves you disturbed, listen to "I am a damned old Rebel." It will get you going. "War is the remedy they have chosen. I propose to give them all they wish for." Genl. W. T. Sherman. BTW I saw Levon at the Old Town School a few weeks before his death, he was happy.
The WABAWS was an epic of sheer human cussedness any people could be proud of.
It inspires reenactors, and not just in the USA, a lot of whom are pretty ideological (on both sides). At least that was true when my friends were reenacting 20 and more years ago. It seems to be, if not dying out, ageing out . . .
Still lots of mythology too (on both sides).
Narr
Ain't no one book 'splains it all
I can't take up my musket
And fight 'em now no more,
But I ain't going to love 'em,
Now that is certain sure,
And I don't want no pardon
For what I was and am.
I won't be reconstructed,
And I do not give a damn.
I always like this rebel song the best:
I rode with old Jeb Stuart, and his band of Southern horse,
And there never were no Yankees, who could meet us force to force.
No they never did defeat us, but we never could evade,
Their dirty foreign politics, and cowardly blockade.
Well we hadn’t any powder, and we hadn’t any shot,
And we hadn’t any money to buy what we ain’t got.
So we rode our worn-out horses, and we ate on plain cornmeal,
And we licked em where we caught em, with Southern guts and steel.
daskol @ 8:39am,
Dude, you owe me big time for making me remember that happily-forgotten monstrosity!
Unknown said... Stan Rogers - prompts me to say "Gordon Who?". A thousand thanks.
The last paragraph of this post is one of the best descriptions I have ever read about how a musical artist reaches someone in their heart. Props to the blog-host.
Wonderful note on a magnificent song as magnificently performed by The Band, Levon Helm singing with such emotional power, And an absolute on the money note on the Billboard bs about the song not being strictly an endorsement of the thorny past, which bs betrays the consummation of a marriage between the failure to understand the song and the desire to virtue toll that nothing at all sympathetic or valorous or redemptive or extolling can be said about the South in the Civil War. The way Billboard has it, because the song sympathetically shows the tragedy of the war for a particular Southerner, Virgil Caine, it’s problematic, “a difficult artefact” is how I think it’s phrased. Nonsense! The “difficulty” lies in the song’s wrenching emotion, Levon Helm evoking it in his singing,
This year I found out that great Cajun band, Creedence Clearwater Revival, was four junior high school buddies from the Bay Area.
I grew up in Texas. As an adult and having a casual conversation with a coworker who grew up near Rochester, NY, I described some event as being about the time of Renconstruction. "What was that?" he asked.
Well, I have rebs in my blood line and choose to honor their legacy. It is a matter of debate whether the the country would have better off in the long run if Lincoln had let the South secede.
Slavery was on the way out throughout the world and in the US as well. It would have fallen under its own weight within 20 or 30 years maximum in a more orderly manner. Was it worth the destruction and death toll?
We still don't like yankees all that much, bless their hearts.
Well, I have rebs in my blood line and choose to honor their legacy. It is a matter of debate whether the the country would have better off in the long run if Lincoln had let the South secede.
Slavery was on the way out throughout the world and in the US as well. It would have fallen under its own weight within 20 or 30 years maximum in a more orderly manner. Was it worth the destruction and death toll?
We still don't like yankees all that much, bless their heart
Lincoln had no power to let the South secede. And when people start telling me with great assurance just exactly when and why something that didn't happen, would have happened, and get all faux-weepy about the cost-- I think:
It took 750,000 dead and five years to end slavery. Let's say that with the help of a
friendly Historical Overmind, we determine that no, it wasn't "worth" it. So then, what
if it had taken 375,000 lives. Worth it? 250,000? How would we know?
The whole notion of orderly emancipation over time is as a-historical as the common sectarian Unionist jibe that if the South had won we'd all be speaking German now.
Equally unknown and unknowable.
Narr
I have rebs in my bloodline too; I am one of their legacies
Sympathy for the Devil
We now need to have sympathy for Lebanon instead
The South is like an abused wife, who tried to leave but was bombed and abused into "the Union," and now years later has to listen to her tyrant abuser and his ilk daily nag her about how she made the worst parts of him and his existence. Let her go or shut up after you made her stay, you ass! Could it be that only a Canadian could properly distill the experience while Bob Dylan (fka Robert Allen Zimmerman) was mangling bible verses in a disharmonious voice and Peter Fonda was making stupid man on a journey movies where Southerners kill passers-by for no particular reason?
I have the book Testimony right here next to me. Got to read it.
JB.BKK must have been reading Mrs. Meriwether.
Narr
What does he say about TNTDODD?
Painting the South as some poor victim is silly.
They were an absurdly arrogant bunch who thought they were 100% right and weren't going to bend an inch - ever. Up and till the very end they considered Kentucky and Missouri as part of the Confederacy and thought the people of W.V. and East Tennessee were "Traitors". They had the right to secede from the USA, but they W.V didn't have the right to leave Va.
The Confederates started the war, and thought 1 Southerner could lick 2 Yankees, and even if that was false, King Cotton would win it for them. NO COMPROMISE was the Jeff Davis motto. And he was Fighting (or rather others were fighting) to the very end. Sherman said it best, the South decided to resolve a political dispute with guns, and they got crushed. They wanted everything and they lost everything. Too bad so many Young boys had to die for the arrogance stupidity of their elders.
I admire the valor of the Southern Soldier and the brilliance of their Generals. But if they'd hung Jeff Davis after the war, it would've been justified.
This song is one unfortunately that I can only hear in my head with Joan Baez. I did not know until today about The Band doing it. I imagine I have heard their performance but all I can hear in my imagination is Baez. And in hers I hear no authentic pain and no empathy of the sort the commenter found. I need to seek out the album I guess. A cure for Baez is always welcome.
"Music From Big Pink" is one of the greatest rock albums of all time.
Fin.
...and The South was avenged by JWB.
rcocean needs some remedial work on the difference between starting a war and exercising a state compact right / power to exit and then defending the territory when attacked?
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