FOREVER YOUNG
How The Band and Bob Dylan Made the Only ’60s Music
That Still Matters
By Nick DeRiso
This examination of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” is excerpted from Nick DeRiso’s forthcoming book, ‘Forever Young: How the Band and Bob Dylan Made the Only ‘60s Music That Still Matters.’ DeRiso is a veteran music writer who lives in New Orleans.
As the Band worked on their self-titled second album in 1968 and ’69, Robbie Robertson’s enthusiasm for the people, tales, and places of Levon Helm’s youth was spreading. “There’s a certain romance about the South,” Rick Danko told me. “That just doesn’t happen anywhere else. It’s not only invigorating, it’s captivating.”
But some of these stories don’t have happy endings. “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” would test Robertson as he reached a key moment in his development as a songwriter. He wasn’t so much interested in relitigating the Civil War as stripping bare the awful costs for the everyday people who get caught up in conflict.
Helm’s poignant and finely detailed vocal brings to life the character of Virgil Caine, the kind of itinerant whom Helm would return to time and again—perhaps most notably on 2007’s Dirt Farmer. Caine survived a battle to defend the Danville railway—the key supply line to Tennessee—but can’t get past the things that were lost: a brother, a sense of purpose, maybe his whole world.
A larger message emerges that goes beyond where someone’s ancestors stood in this awful conflagration of states. Deaths and deprivations are part of every war, and opening hearts to that shared misery might just serve to narrow wider divides. That’s a lot for any song to accomplish, but “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” does.
Robertson reached this hard-won new vista by carefully echoing the language and rhythms of the South, pulling in elements both deeply human and historically specific. The song, for instance, begins with a reference to Major General George Stoneman. He was a minor figure in the larger war but deeply despised in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western Virginia and North Carolina for his demoralizing scorched-earth raids on civilian targets, similar to Stoneman mentor William T. Sherman’s infamous March to the Sea.
In fact, the rugged sense of place is so visceral, with shades of both blue and gray, that it was difficult to believe the words didn’t actually belong to Helm. Robertson said he spent some eight months crafting these lyrics, while Helm remembered taking the Canadian-born Robertson to the library to read up on the war. Ultimately, however, the composing credit was reserved for Robertson alone.
“There’s always the debate about songwriting versus collaboration, versus storytelling. It’s a personal thing,” longtime Helm collaborator Jimmy Vivino told me. “It’s up to the writer to say: ‘Gee, Levon told me this story, I should put him down.’ It’s totally up to the writer. But then someone takes offense years later, because people say: ‘Hey, I know this story came from you.’ The lines are very blurred.”
No one else could have sung this song, but Helm wasn’t alone in its triumph. Richard Manuel and Danko added to the chorus’s well of emotion, while Garth Hudson played a Hohner Melodica and far-away trumpet.
Then “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” somehow got bigger, both musically and emotionally, on stage in 1971 at the Academy of Music. Horn charts by New Orleans arranger Allen Toussaint gave the song a muscular new sweep, even as trumpet ace Snooky Young contributed a memorably lonely call. Ralph Gleason’s contemporary review in Rolling Stone heaped praise on the resulting live album Rock of Ages, describing the performances as a “cultural mix unequaled in contemporary music.”
“You’re talking about Snooky Young’s thing and all of these subtle beautiful elements, and the things that Garth is doing that blends with the horn section and complements it,” Robertson told me. “There’s just a beautiful musicology that’s going on in support of these songs. That’s why somebody like Ralph Gleason would say, ‘Oh my God, this has risen to a whole different level.’”
By focusing on an individual tragedy, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” found a new way to talk about this crossroads moment in America—and, as with so much of the South’s folklore and myth, the Band would discover new emotional depths with every retelling. –Nick DeRiso