r/ShermanPosting • u/JFKsBrain • 4d ago
The Band: The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down
Not about Sherman but General George Stoneman.
I think it’s in the spirit of the sub though and it’s a great song that references Sherman’s Neckties.
Lyrics:
Virgil Kane is the name
And I served on the Danville train
'Till Stoneman's cavalry came
And tore up the tracks again
In the winter of '65
We were hungry, just barely alive
By May the 10th, Richmond had fell
It's a time I remember, oh so well
The night they drove old Dixie down
And the bells were ringing
The night they drove old Dixie down
And the people were singing
They went, "Na, na, la, na, na, la"
Back with my wife in Tennessee
When one day she called to me
"Virgil, quick, come see,
There goes Robert E. Lee!"
Now, I don't mind chopping wood
And I don't care if the money's no good
You take what you need
And you leave the rest
But they should never
Have taken the very best
The night they drove old Dixie down
And the bells were ringing
The night they drove old Dixie down
And all the people were singing
They went, "Na, na, la, na, na, la"
Like my father before me
I will work the land
And like my brother above me
Who took a rebel stand
He was just 18, proud and brave
But a Yankee laid him in his grave
I swear by the mud below my feet
You can't raise a Kane back up
When he's in defeat
The night they drove old Dixie down
And the bells were ringing
The night they drove old Dixie down
And all the people were singing
They went, "Na, na, la, na, na, la"
The night they drove old Dixie down
And all the bells were ringing
The night they drove old Dixie down
And the people were singing
They went, "Na, na, la, na, na, la"
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u/returnofthequack92 4d ago
Amazing song.
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u/AncientSignature1505 4d ago
I prefer the version from The Last Waltz, but fr, The Band was amazing.
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u/returnofthequack92 4d ago
You should look up Trampled by Turtles version, it’s probably my favorite
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u/thebaintrain1993 4d ago
The Joan Baez cover is my favorite
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u/Moose135A 4d ago
Some of the lyrics in her version are different. I read an interview where she said she never had a written copy of the lyrics, and sang it based off how it sounded to her.
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u/rh6779 3d ago
Although Levon Helm, the drummer and only American in the band, hailed from Arkansas, the lyrics were written by Robbie Robertson, a Canadian of native descent. I'm sure Helm's stories of growing up in the south influenced the writing but I would hope glorifying the 'lost cause' would not be at the forefront of Robertson's mind. I am not a fan of Robertson the man, either, for just the way he carried himself and treated his band mates.
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u/JFKsBrain 3d ago
Levon Helm was no Lost Causer either.
Far from it.
He was a human rights activist who worked with Amnesty International.
They even honored him after his death.
Definitely not the type of man nostalgic for a time of chattel slavery.https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2012/04/people-want-freedom-a-tribute-to-levon-helm/
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u/Significant-Web-8076 4d ago
Checkout Wildfire by Watchhouse (formerly Mandolin Orange). “It could have been different, it could have been easy…”
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u/Complex_Student_7944 4d ago edited 4d ago
What a glorious moment in time, to have known the South had been utterly crushed and reduced to ashes and with all the optimism of a new day to look forward to. Now, we deal with the sad reality that we let those awful hellholes states back into the Union and that they have gone on to contaminate the rest of nation with all of their awfulness.
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u/bobthebobbest 4d ago
You guys are aware that this song is basically Lost Cause mythos, right?
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u/JFKsBrain 4d ago edited 4d ago
It isn’t.
That’s later revisionism.
It’s an anti-war song.
Levon Helm stopped singing it partly because that’s how it was later being perceived.
The songwriter, Robbie Robertson, has also disavowed the motives the revisionists tried to project onto the song.
Here’s one article on i:
https://savingcountrymusic.com/the-night-they-drove-old-dixie-down-needs-no-redemption/
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u/AnfieldRoad17 4d ago
It really is both. The lyrics obviously address the consequences of war on the common man (a theme pretty pervasive at the time the song was written), but it also invites mourning and sympathy for the south without really addressing the fact that the south brought this upon itself. Its also worth noting that the south was not a monolith during the war. There were many southerners (north Alabama, east Tennessee, West VA) that suffered from the war while fighting against the succession. So, it could have been told from that perspective (or at least acknowledged) but wasn't. That is a big opportunity missed.
Like most things in life, it's not black and white.
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u/bobthebobbest 4d ago
We can like a song that might have issues—I like it.
Not realizing that one is engaged in lost cause mythos is not the same as not being engaged in lost cause mythos.
But, just from the article you posted, which is rather incoherent and full of non sequiturs:
> what Rolling Stone shared about the song on their Greatest Songs of All Time list in 2011, calling it “moving,” and said it “evoked the interior struggle of someone trying to make sense of a lost cause,”
This is the earlier Rolling Stone interpretation that the author endorses.
Also, please notice that the supposed argument of this article is basically “Do you really think any of our favorite progressive folk icons would accidentally engage in lost cause mythos?” Sorry, but yes, yes I do. It was basically just in the water for most of the twentieth century.
Edit: for what it’s worth, the song can be both a powerful allegory for the Vietnam War, and engage in lost cause mythos.
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u/flatirony 4d ago
I don’t know why this is downvoted. I’ve covered two Band songs in my own bands (“The Weight” and “Up on Cripple Creek”), but I won’t cover this one even though I love most aspects of the song. It’s obviously revering Robert E. Lee.
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u/bobthebobbest 4d ago
Also I cannot express how beside the point nearly everything in the article that person linked is. It’s one step from saying “My grandma is a nice person. Now you’re telling me it’s racist when she says nice things about ‘colored’ people just because she uses that word?”
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u/JFKsBrain 4d ago
I guess beauty is in the eye of the brholder.
I’m a Yank from the home of abolitionism.
I’ve never had a Lost Cause sympathy in my life.
I don’t interpret the lyrics like that at all.
Granted the link wasn’t the best but regardless Levon and Robbie both denied it was sympathetic to the Lost Cause.
Good enough for me.5
u/bobthebobbest 4d ago
> I guess beauty is in the eye of the brholder.
I don’t understand why you and a handful of others can’t distinguish the specific criticism I’ve made from the question of whether it’s a great song. I’ve even stated that I like the song (a lot).
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u/JFKsBrain 4d ago
I get the distinction.
I simply don’t interpret the lyrics that way.
Cheers.5
u/bobthebobbest 4d ago
I’m not sure you do, given that what I said had nothing to do with beauty, but your response was immediately about beauty.
Cheers.
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u/DevilishAdvocate1587 4d ago
Hell, I’m a southerner who has an ancestor that was in one of Stoneman’s cavalry regiments. That’s a big reason I like the song.
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u/Puppiesarebetter 3d ago
Song is a banger and it’s been argued up and down from the band to everyone else, they’ve spoken on it and the band will always be good in my book
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u/Tholian_Bed 4d ago
This is a pro-South song that has caused nothing but trouble today. And that is a facxt.
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u/Tholian_Bed 4d ago
It's hard to believe but last century, before the internet I would note, the South did not mean what it means today, and singing "songs about the South land" was not implying anything more than you liked to drink beer and chase skirts, so to speak.
Then, America decided to lean hard on American History X and related idiot's moves. Next thing you know, instead of "Give Me Three Steps" people are chating Jews Will Not Replace US whilst carrying the rebel flag..
I know full well the ugly always was there but it took over, totally.
So today, about this song.
You take what you need
And you leave the rest
But they should never
Have taken the very best
Actually, they didn't take enough. The entire affair failed and clearly, Southern style racism is more alive today than when I was a teen listening to Skynyrd.
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u/banghi 4d ago
The General Lee had a racist flag on its hood.
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u/Tholian_Bed 4d ago
You had to be a pre-teen when that show was released is my point. It was a narrow window of time, before very bad shit took over. I remember when I got online in the late 90's how much "Nazi shit" was online, and was already forming a subculture. If anyone is of that age group, they can vouch. Only on hindsight did I realize, of course these folks were online: they wewre recruiting.
So all I'm saying, we genuinely went down a very bad road starting around the turn of the century, and the internet created an intensive rerun of all the Lost Causes. This was not happening in 1975. No internet. It was a dumb TV show.
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u/CormoranNeoTropical 4d ago
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250239266/roberteleeandme/
In the North, it was indeed innocuous (or it seemed that way to us white folks — and our sin was naivety, which is eminently correctable).
In the South, not so much.
Have a good one.
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u/0xf5f 4d ago
I know what you're saying, but it's not quite right. The "we love the south" and confederate flags and stuff weren't purposefully racist much of the time. That much is true. For many of kids listening to Skynyrd, it was just what you said. But not knowing that you're saying something isn't the same as not saying it.
The flags and rhetoric were still symbols of hate and murder, it's just that they were so normalized people forgot that fact, and young people were taught to fly them explicitly, while the teachings about the (lack of) value of black life were frequently unspoken and implicit but - and this is important - still present. If you fly a Nazi flag, it means "Jews are subhuman" even if you aren't thinking that sentence. A band flying nazi flags is still racist even if some fan somewhere is too naive to get that fact. The confederate flag is not different in this regard.
The past, idk, 25 years have changed the knowledge. Now it's a lot more common for your average white guy to understand that the confederate flag is racist as hell. It's just that a very gross percentage of them said "yeah that's cool, I'm into it"
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u/Tholian_Bed 4d ago
I hope people didn't think I was saying "and those days can come back."
One of the big hits this century for me has been, discovering racism was very much an in-demand political good. For my generation, it's sickening. I thought for sure we were putting this to sleep.
The fact I visit this subreddit is proof, it hasn't been put to sleep at all.
This subreddit should be a ghost town. Know what I'm saying there? It's 2026 and this shit, is more alive than it was when I was a teen, and I do not think I'm imagining things.
Until then, here we are.
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u/0xf5f 2d ago
yeah word im with ya. i grew up with, basically, "oh that's racist? damn my bad" just being a part of basic learning to navigate the world. cause you copy shit from tv or friends or whatever without understanding it. but racism is bad, so you drop the racist shit when you find out you're doing it. same for other forms of discrimination.
it absolutely fucked me up to find out that that is apparently a controversial and not necessary common position. like what?
i guess we were raised right 🤷
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u/pixel_pete Duryée's Zouaves / Garrard's Tigers 4d ago
That might be the sanitized TV-friendly version of "the South" in the 20th century, that might be the nostalgic memory of your childhood. But it is so profoundly and categorically not the complete reality. We're talking about lynch mobs, direct government actions, and crowds cheering for "segregation forever" within that century.
It didn't "just" take over, we just decided to pretend it didn't exist for a couple decades so we could pat ourselves on the back as a society over an unearned victory.
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u/bobthebobbest 4d ago
> That might be the sanitized TV-friendly version of "the South" in the 20th century, that might be the nostalgic memory of your childhood.
As (I think) you’re pointing out, to the extent this was the case, it is the result of Lost Cause mythos.
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u/pixel_pete Duryée's Zouaves / Garrard's Tigers 4d ago
100%, the aw shucks folksy good ol' boy mass media iconography is an evolution of the lost cause which persists even today. We imagine Johnny Reb as a hootin' hollerin' down home country boy who misses his momma and doesn't like bedtimes or bankers, and in the process forget the aristocratic elites who were (and largely still are) at the helm of the ship.
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4d ago
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u/bobthebobbest 4d ago
You are literally describing the result of a century of Lost Cause propaganda.
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u/Tholian_Bed 4d ago
I disagree with you.
I think this is an active culture of people. This is the rsult of people not propaganda. Today's neo-Nazi's were not weaned on reruns of Hogan's Heroes.
Propaganda needs people who want to hear it. Last century me and my friends weren't hearing it.
I am sorry if this upsets your narrative, but this is my testimony.
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u/bobthebobbest 4d ago
Everything you say here is beside the point. The sanitized version of the confederate flag, etc. that you were all celebrating was, itself, the result of Lost Cause propaganda.
No one is saying you were all neo-Nazis.
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u/CormoranNeoTropical 4d ago
I’m from the exact same background you’re referring to. But we were living in a bubble.
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u/ShermanPosting-ModTeam 4d ago
Rule 2: don't be rude
this is an accepting community, the only people that aren't welcome are lost causers and racists
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u/ShermanPosting-ModTeam 4d ago
Rule 2: don't be rude
this is an accepting community, the only people that aren't welcome are lost causers and racists
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u/Tholian_Bed 4d ago
I'm testifying and people are saying I'm naive.
Tell these posters to accept I'm an older person who is testifying to my experience.
Or, pick on me, play it safe.
Your call. You can tell people to cool it, or you can tell me to cool it.
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u/Subject_Marzipan3179 4d ago
Actually, even in the mid-20th Century there was nuance about the South in TV shows. Just look at the legendary 1950s-60s western show Wagon Train for example (which is set less than 10 years after the Civil War), some southerners were shown to be horrific racists toward Native Americans and others, some were disillusioned ex-Confederates who had begun to adopt more racially tolerant or even progressive views (now seeing slavery as evil), and several were even revealed to have been Southern Unionists who secretly or openly worked against secession and the Confederate cause. This is why the wagon train's crew, led mostly by Union veterans from the North, are willing to let southerners travel with them on the California Trail, because they recognize that they are not a monolith and a few even former allies.
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u/Tholian_Bed 4d ago
People are interested in judging the past on this thread, not understanding it.
Kids. I get it. These times suck.
It also sucks people just pile on because one ain't cutting straight to the judging part.
The 20th century was complicated. I grew up in the Northeast. The internet has created an inability of people to understand, things could be radically different depending on where you lived.
And this was not some illusion, it was our pre-digital life. Millennials and afterwards cannot comprehend such a world.
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4d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/ShermanPosting-ModTeam 4d ago
Rule 2: don't be rude
this is an accepting community, the only people that aren't welcome are lost causers and racists
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u/CormoranNeoTropical 4d ago
“It’s hard to believe but last century… the South did not mean what it means today”
False. Liberal Northerners who believed in naive concepts like colorblindness once thought this.
I know, because this was me until I went to college, and even more, until I spent a couple of years in Germany in 2011-2013 and had occasion to wonder why the US didn’t memorialize our historical crimes like Germany began to do a generation after WWII.
But to everyone else, indulging in Southern nostalgia was always an acceptable way to show off your racism.
That’s why these kinds of songs were invented and popularized by virulent racists, such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
(I just read “Robert E Lee and Me” based on a recommendation in this sub, I highly recommend that book to anyone who wants to understand this history. The author is GenX like me, but I think it’s a great read for anyone.)
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u/The_Bababillionaire 4d ago
Do you have any credentials or is this your opinion in the form of anecdotes?
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4d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/ShermanPosting-ModTeam 4d ago
Rule 2: don't be rude
this is an accepting community, the only people that aren't welcome are lost causers and racists
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u/SkiHistoryHikeGuy 4d ago
I always thought it was referring to the kids who died in the war. Not partisan just anti war.
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u/Sylvanussr 4d ago
This is 100% a lost cause song.
“I served on the Danville train” references working on a confederate railroad.
Complaining about General Stoneman’s cavalry disrupting their supply lines.
Running to see Robert E . Lee pass through town.
“They should never have taken the very best”
His brother taking a “rebel stand proud and brave before a Yankee put him in his grave”
Like, how is this anything but sympathetic to the confederacy?
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u/redbirdjazzz 4d ago
The Robert E. Lee
It’s talking about the steamboat.The song’s about what Virgil lost, not what the Confederacy lost.
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