The Band played this song at the Last Waltz concert (which I've linked as the definitive version). That was supposed to be the last time the Band ever played. A few members did actually re-group and plug along for a much more diminished run. But Levon Helm never played "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" again. If that’s all "The Last Waltz" really meant, that's by far enough.
The music is so visceral and moving, some of the very, very best ever recorded. Right from the mournful opening fanfare, this song is a rare, blood-dark gem.
The hot takes about the Civil War will never stop emanating from small people in our own time.
It's actually possible, however, to separate the politics, ethics, and morals of the war from the basic human drama that unfolded on both sides of the conflict. Death, loss, defeat, shame, and desperation are universal experiences that everyone gets to have. Maybe, to some, accepting that makes me a compromiser. To this imagined slight, I retort that I am an artist, and I want to see from a solar distance. In my estimation, objective, widely curious artists are truly braver and more controversial than any artist swathed in their partisan cuddle blankets.
I think some people assume that Levon Helm, who contributed to the ideas in these lyrics, was painting some Lost Cause portrait of Southern justification. Why? Of course, he was from Arkansas. The decision to inhabit the thoughts of some poverty-stricken Southerner at the downfall of the Confederacy, that sympathy alone, given Helm's origin, gets played as damning evidence of his white supremacist alignment.
I'm gonna tell you, I don't think Levon Helm gave a damn for much other than music itself. Every time I heard him talk about his upbringing, it was mostly about all his wonderful childhood memories of taking part in the adults' parties and music, which inspired him to become one of the absolute greatest musical talents America has ever produced, from any region. He, like many artists, had an appreciation of people for their experiences, their organic, inborn poetry. He spent his adult life driving and playing throughout the entire country, seeing every corner of it, every type of soul, on the ground, collecting every manner of story.
The song is about one poor man from the Confederate South, the fictional Virgil Caine. Caine makes no ideological points. His entire story is what lays before his very eyes: The destruction of Southern infrastructure to bring its capitulation, a chance sight of Robert E. Lee, the sounds of the towns and the cities on the day of surrender, and the physical facts of the dirt below him and his brother above.
It's so well written that it feels of that time. That's what hits me.