Also, it’s “Like my father before me, I will work the land”, not “… I"m a working man”, but that one doesn’t really make a difference. “There goes the Robert E. Lee” wouldn’t have happened in that part of Virginia, either.
The song evokes a melancholy sense of loss from a perspective of the average man, who had little to do with the politics of slavery. A sentimental acknowledgement of defeat. And family loss, and the way of life that wasn’t coming back. Most of those young people who died were just fighting for their local towns and family. The whole Civil War was a butcher bath of young men for politics they did not really support or understand. This part of history is being lost in the recent revisionist black/white good/bad rewrite. But that is for a different thread.
Like my father before me, I’m a Jedi man.
It’s probably not a good idea to attack liberal sexual harassers like Harvey Weinstein and then follow it with a positive reference toAl Capp who had some “busy hands” himself.
He was “back with [his] wife in Tennessee” by then. The steamboat Robert E. Lee sailed on the Mississippi River, which is the western boundary of Tennessee: Robert E. Lee (steamboat) - Wikipedia
I like both Baez’s and The Band’s versions of the song, although I noticed that Baez sang “so much cavalry” while The Band sang “Stoneman’s cavalry,” which is both historically accurate and scans a little better: George Stoneman - Wikipedia
I don’t mean this to apply to the quoted poster, but The assumption that a singer of humanity and justice cannot sing an empathetic tribute to a Dixie working family is the sort of simplistic “political correctness” that sometimes makes post-rational progressive thought a caricature of itself (and may sometimes even drive potential Blue voters into the hands of the Red liars).
I stopped liking Al Capp when I saw him at the bed-in with j and y feigning offense… But there was more to his resume:
From Wiki:
Allegations of sexual assault
In her autobiography, American actress Goldie Hawn stated that Capp sexually propositioned her on a casting couch and exposed himself to her when she was nineteen years old. When she refused his advances, Capp became angry and told her that she was “never gonna make anything in your life” and that she should “go and marry a Jewish dentist. You’ll never get anywhere in this business.”[32][33]
In 1971, investigative journalist Jack Anderson wrote that Capp had exposed his genitals to four female students at the University of Alabama. Then after an incident at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, Capp was arrested and tried for indecent exposure and sodomy. He was fined $500, and his career and reputation were ruined. Two biographies, one about Goldie Hawn and the other about Grace Kelly, describe Capp as trying to force Hawn and Kelly into sex.[34]
My feeling is that Joan was looking for a good tune, that might be commercial to do. And the Band were a hot songwriting propostiion right then, in her musical wheelhouse, and they were friends of friends. She had to fill up 12 slots in an LP and was looking for the logical candidates, of which this was a very good one. It’s the same modus she used for all of her earlier LPs, where she did Bob, the beatles, Phil Ochs, etc etc.
I believe you, but metro lyrics had it spelled Kane. In my defense.
[Moderating]
Jim’s Son, you have been warned about your inappropriate politicking many, many times, and apparently you didn’t learn anything either from those warnings, or from your recent suspension. This is another Warning, and your posting privileges are under discussion.
And wasn’t built until 1866.
So pretty much what I said, Dennis?
During the Civil War, a lot of the less well-off whites in the South hated the well-off whites much more than the black slaves. The less well-off whites had to work their own small farms, since they couldn’t afford slaves. The well-off whites owned plantations and had slaves to work the land. The less well-off whites despised the well-off whites for getting them into a war that only benefited the well-off whites. See the movie Free State of Jones for some insight on this.
If every poor, white southerner behaved like the character in that movie, there wouldn’t have been a Civil War.
I imagine a southern farmer who doesn’t own slaves. I imagine asking him these questions:
Is slavery immoral?
What would happen to your state’s economy and your livelihood if slavery were abolished?
What would happen if all of the former slaves were now free and were your neighbors?
I don’t imagine his answers would do much to support the idea that the typical soldier wasn’t fighting to preserve the institution of slavery. Pretending that non-slave owners didn’t know they benefited from slavery or weren’t afraid of what would happen after abolition is one way that it’s made acceptable to glorify them.
Maybe they were on the wrong side of history but a lot of these were very young men and sometimes not even adults. The Confederate Conscription Act was passed in 1862 and so many were effectively drafted and punishment could be execution it’s not really fair to judge those young men by today’s morality it was a much different time period. It’s not like the North was some bastion of civil rights either they had the famous riots in New York, where would-be draftees tortured, lynched and killed a lot of black people. The deaths on both sides of the war were a tragedy, at least in my opinion.
That being said music is art and its always interesting to examine the other point of view like say examining WWII from the perspective of a German soldier, they were fighting on the wrong side but you can still feel sympathy and commiserate with a lot of the individual people and their suffering, it was a bad time for everyone.
Just so. Even as a child, I understood it as a song about Reconstruction, rather than the war itself.
Or better yet, read W.J. Cash’s The Mind Of The South, where he notes that as much as they hated the planter aristocracy, who looked down on them, the poor whites hated the blacks even more; since the only thing that separated them from the absolute bottom of the ladder was their skin color, they were fanatical about making sure the blacks were below them. Bob Ewell in To Kill A Mockingbird is a perfect example of this; he’s well aware that the upper and middle class of Maycomb thinks he’s “trash” (and have more sympathy for Tom Robinson and his family, especially after Atticus Finch shows that Ewell, rather than Robinson, beat and maybe raped, his daughter). While all the white residents of Maycomb are racist to a degree, Bob is the most vicious and virulent.
And General Robert E. Lee never was in Tennessee during the war.
Joan sang southern folk songs for her whole early career, some of them dating back hundreds of years. It was a little less sensitive time, in 1971.
I would have said there was neither praise nor glory in TNTDODD.
The only part of the song that bothered me was “by May tenth, Richmond had fell”. Lincoln visited the fallen Richmond days before he was shot in April. Where the hell did May 10 come from? I assume it’s just a matter of syllables.
There is no comparison between The Band and Levon Helm’s soulful singing of this song and Joan Baez’s soulless valium-drip version. Why she sung it, I don’t know. Why anyone would ever listen to it when the infinitely better rendition is available is beyond me.
I’d agree with this - if it weren’t for the song’s title and chorus. To me, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” doesn’t sound like a lament for the working man, or even for the land; it sounds instead like he’s bemoaning the fall of the Confederacy at the hands of the Yankees.
Now, maybe by"Old Dixie" he’s referring to the land and its people, and not to the political entity. I don’t know. Is Dixie the South, or is it the Confederacy?