A Short More Nuanced Reading Of The Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”?

 

The question mark in the title of this post wants to know if this reading makes sense.

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Whether this song is explicitly racist or baldly glorifies the Confederacy and other such incendiary claims are straw men that evade the claim that a reading of the song that among other things expresses regret for the lost cause cannot be ruled out. IE the song can plausibly be understood in part as an expression of regret for the lost Southern cause. 

After all, its title and refrain say, “The night they drove old Dixie down”. How can that not be read as expressing regret, regret for “old Dixie” with its connotation of comfortable familiarity, of, in a word, home?

Or how about: 

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…?

The contrast between praise and pride mixed with terrible sadness for his lost brother and his brother’s cause—“took a rebel stand”, proud and brave”—and the coldness toward the enemy—But a Yankee—is of course understandable. But isn’t it laced with warm regret and contrasting cold impersonal hatred for the other? 

After all, what was his brother rebelling against; what was he proud of; on what was his courage expended? Was it not all about a way of life that defended slavery and saw the enemy as that which would take that slave-based way of life away? Does not Virgil Kane’s regret go to all of this as well of course to his own deeply personal loss? The song is written from the perspective of a southerner during the Civil war, for goodness sake: how could its regret not take in all of the foregoing?

Defences of this song are off the mark when they respond to the song’s alleged explicit racism or its explicit championing or the Confederacy. Those are defences against what isn’t there and deal not at all with what more layered is there.

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update:

Friend: 

Your reading of the song is, I think, inarguable in its identification of regret for what the war has cost Virgil, and I think that the narrative POV is intentionally that of the rural working class southerner whose family had no slaves (they worked the land themselves) and was not directly involved in the economic power structure of the slaveholding South.

It seems to me that hostility to 'The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down' is often fueled by the sense that it's an apology for the Confederacy, but for me it's more complicated -- Lee is a distant figure just passing by, and the lyric turns immediately to "I don't mind choppin' wood" and I've always thought that the lines "Take what you need and leave the rest" could refer to the Confederate forces forcibly recruiting young guys, not to the Union.

Me:

Great point about Virgil, his family, not owing slaves.

I sense that in his pride at his brother’s rebel stand, and his seeming affirmation of his brother’s own pride and bravery, there’s among other things regret at the loss of “old Dixie” a huge component of which was slaveholding. That’s what I meant by “layered”. It’s layered within the overall regret the song gives voice to. 

Apparently, RR was moved to write the song after meeting Levon Helm’s Arkansan family.

A factoid: I read that the reference to “the Robert E. Lee” is to a passing steam ship named that. 

I agree and tried to say that criticism of the song as an, as you say, apology for the Confederacy is inapt. Something more subtle and nuanced is going on but that includes, I’d argue and as I just noted, by necessary implication the defeat of a way of life that among other things was built on slaveholding. 

My sense of “leave the rest” was a reference to Northern troops by war’s end ransacking virtuality everything as they moved along. But you could well be right. 

On further maybe final reflection, I can’t see criticism of the song that I thought I could see. If The Night…shows Virgil lamenting the driving down of old Dixie and all that is included in that, then that’s what it’s expressing. The portrayal and drama of his genuine sense of tragic loss, I now think, subsume that criticism. 

This maybe final view of it all just came to me now in the midst of writing this note.

You’re a heck of a midwife. :-)