The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down

"Virgil, quick, come see, there goes Robert E. Lee!"

Some say the above line is referring to the steamshipRobert E Lee. But I believe the writer may be using Lee is as metaphor, meaning ‘a rebel army unit’ (is advancing or passing by)

“Now I don't mind, I'm chopping wood And I don't care if the money's no good”

I believe here, he is not grumbling about the poor pay chopping wood. Chopping wood was a necessity in those days for heating and cooling. He is grumbling about the money being worthless, because in 1865, nearly ½ of all money in circulation was counterfeit, being ‘no good’. ‘No mind to other problems, the wood needs chopped’.

“Ya take what ya need and ya leave the rest, But they should never have taken the very best“

IMO, the above lines are a clear reference to foraging . Civil war armies would raid nearby farms “taking what they need“, this was called ‘foraging’. But they rarely took only what they needed, they typically robbed farms of the best stock, money, clothing etc., sometimes leaving homesteaders destitute, with little or nothing to live on.

this song is awesome. a song about the civil war written during the vietnam war. i love joan's voice.

This song came out when I was 11 yrs old and it was unlike anything I had ever heard on the radio. ... this strong voice singing the song from the perspective of a civil war soldier. I became a Joan Baez fan at that time.

Although The Band wrote this song, and sung by Levon Helm, a southerner, it probably has raw emotion, I still prefer Joan's version to theirs. It flows better.

this song is one of those rare ones that actually imprint IMAGES in your head!! geez, I can almost feel the ice cold weather and smell the smoke from the trains! LOVE THIS SONG!

I have a hard time enjoying this version of the song, as Joan displays a lack of knowledge of the subject matter. She clearly sings, "'til STONEWALL's calvary came, and tour up the tracks again." This, of course, makes no sense. "Stonewall" Jackson was a very important Confederate general. The lyric printed above is correct; it was the Union leader "Stoneman" who led a calvary division to destroy Confederate railway lines. She also screws up the final verse by singing "I swear by the BLOOD below my feet..." when it should be mud. Virgil is standing at his brother's grave, so "blood" doesn't even make sense. The song, when sung correctly, is one of my favorite, so maybe that's why I find myself wincing so much at this version.

I otherwise like Joan Baez, and was thrilled to see her as a surprise guest once at an Indigo Girls concert. She did a version of "House of the Rising Sun", another favorite of mine.

I'm astonished that none of these commentators (and apparently not even Joan Baez) has noted the twisted political implications of this song, particularly in the historical context when it was composed and sung. It is a nostalgic paean to "old Dixie," whose political and economic order was based on the enslavement and brutalization of millions of African Americans. It is not, as some might say, the celebration of a morally neutral "heritage." It is an elegy to the poor white advocates of the Confederacy sung at the height of the Civil Rights Movement.

Instead of testifying to the evil of enslavement and the evil that so many poor boys killed and died in its defense, this song pretends that what's sad is that the old South was forced to change.

What's most disgusting, though, is that this 1960s nostalgia for the old South (including the sudden insertion of the Confederate flag design into state flags all over the South) is obviously a thinly-veiled metaphor and populist emblem of poor whites' wish to preserve their superiority to black people at a time when black Americans were rightly demanding human equality for people of all colors and classes. Shame on them and on the composers and singers of this song.

I am so disappointed by the lack of critical discourse around this popular and seductively beautiful song.