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The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down

The most famous song on The Band, and one of the most fully realized pieces of historical songwriting Robertson ever wrote. Before sitting down to it, he went to the library and read up on the Civil War, determined to write something that treated the defeated South with genuine sympathy rather than caricature, a reversal, as he later put it, of the usual rock and roll instinct to cast the rebel as the hero. The narrator, Virgil Caine, is a Confederate railroad worker watching Richmond fall in the winter after Appomattox, mourning a lost world rather than a lost cause in any political sense.

Levon Helm sings lead, and the song draws directly on his own upbringing in Arkansas; Robertson has said he wrote it partly for Helm, out of the years the two of them had spent together since Helm first brought him into the Hawks. The arrangement builds around Helm's voice and drumming, with Danko and Manuel joining for the close harmonies on the chorus, and Garth Hudson's bass lines anchor the song's slow, mournful gait.

The song became a genuine standard almost immediately. Joan Baez had a Top 5 hit with her own cover in 1971, and it has been recorded dozens of times since, by artists across country, folk, and rock. Rolling Stone has ranked it among its 250 greatest songs of all time on more than one occasion.

Notable versions