The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
That destroyed Richmond in 1865

The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down is a song by the Canadian-American rock group The Band . It was written by the Canadian musician Robbie Robertson and first appeared on the album The Band in September 1969 , but was never released as a single.

In 1971 folksinger Joan Baez landed her first and only US top ten hit with a cover version of the title. There are also many other cover versions; the melody became known in German-speaking countries in particular through the number one hit on the day when Conny Kramer died by Juliane Werding .

The text

General Robert E. Lee , one of the characters in the song

The text of The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down (meaning: The night in which the Old South was buried ) deals - even if not always historically exact in details - with the end of the Civil War and the time afterwards from the perspective a white member of the southern states (also popularly called Dixieland ). He describes the pain of defeat, but also the unbroken pride of the losers. The song became part of the ideology of the pseudo-historical myth The Lost Cause .

The narrator introduces himself as Virgil Caine, a soldier in the Confederate Army of General Robert E. Lee . The English-language name Caine stands for the biblical Cain , who slew his brother Abel and was cast out by God for it. The war between the northern and southern states has often been referred to as fratricide.

Caine was on the Danville - Richmond railway , one of the central supply lines in the south, until it was destroyed by the cavalry troops of George Stoneman . Caine looks back on the suffering among his comrades in the winter of 1865 ( "In the winter of '65, we were hungry, just barely alive." ), On the case of Richmond, which heralded the end of the war, and the day of the capture of Jefferson Davis .

The second verse takes place after the end of the war. Caine is back with his wife in Tennessee when she believes one day she is seeing Robert E. Lee, who for many white southerners is still considered a hero who only lost due to unfortunate circumstances. The mention of Lee here acts as a symbol for the expected resurrection of the south.

Caine portrays himself as a man who does n't mind hard work and bad earnings ("Now I don't mind choppin 'wood, and I don't care if the money's no good.") . Despite everything, the pain of defeat is still deep (“But they should never have taken the very best.”) In the third verse we learn that he comes from a family of farmers. His older brother was also a soldier and was killed by a Yankee when he was only 18 years old ("He was just eighteen, proud and brave, But a Yankee laid him in his grave.") .

Robertson leaves it in his text to tell the story of Virgil Caine without evaluating it, the American Civil War is only a backdrop. Jason Ankeny wrote for Allmusic : “... it seems primarily a character study of one of the many soldiers who risked their lives in the name of fighting for what they believed in, no matter how right or wrong, and the devastating effects such conflicts, regardless of which side wins. " the reason for choosing the backdrop was from Arkansas native Levon Helm . Jonathan Taplin (among others in the management of The Band ) recalls in an interview with the music critic Robert Palmer for Rolling Stone : "... I went to Robbie and asked him:" How did that get out of you? And he just said that he after being with Levon for so long in his life and being in this place at the time ... It was so much inside of him that he wanted to write this song directly at Levon to let him know how much this he liked Things meant .. "

The The Band recording

Drummer and singer Levon Helm
occupation

The Band's second album was recorded at Sammy Davis junior's home in the Hollywood Hills. Most of the track was recorded live: Robertson played acoustic guitar, Helm played drums and sang the lead vocals, Danko played bass, Manuel piano and Hudson melodica. The backing vocals were later added by overdubbing , and Hudson placed an accordion sound over his melodica on his Lowrey organ, giving the impression that a harmonica was being played. Furthermore, Hudson contributed a trumpet part; Danko's fiddle part was initially unused, it can only be heard on a later mix.

Special

Levon Helm's drum pattern is the outstanding musical feature of the recording. In the stanza it reminds of tired soldiers who stumble forward rather slowly than march in an orderly manner. In the chorus , the drumming gains strength and is reminiscent of a military march that collapses again at the end of the chorus. The Band biographer Barney Hoskyns cites the title in his book Across the Great Divide as an example of The Band's typical staple three-part harmonies in the chorus: “In The Band's staple three-part harmonies, Richard's falsetto sat on top, Rick was in the middle, and Levon lay on the bottom. "

Although The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down only appeared as the B-side of Up on Cripple Creek (1969) and Georgia on My Mind (1977), it is one of The Band's best-known titles . Until Robertson left, he was an integral part of every concert in the group.

Der Dixie , the template for the live intro for The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down

On live recordings, the title was usually recorded with the support of a brass section, the brass arrangements are by Allen Toussaint . For the intro, Toussaint used the line “Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie-Land ” from the title Dixie by Daniel Emmett (1859). You can hear these versions u. a. on the live albums Rock of Ages and The Last Waltz (both with jazz musician Howard Johnson on tuba), the latter is considered one of the best versions of the title. Rolling Stone critic Greil Marcus wrote: "Levon sang with anger he'd never before given the song." Helm himself wrote in his book This Wheel's on Fire : "Maybe the best live performance of this song we ever gave."

Composition and text-music relationship

The Dixie quote at the beginning of The Band's interpretations of the song fulfills several functions: First of all, it creates a reference to the "Old South" of the USA, and the association with the Civil War theme is also positively imposed on the American listener by this directly assignable musical fragment .

At the tonal level, the quotation serves to establish the key of the actual piece, C major . This key is - at least up to the first refrain - never confirmed beyond doubt for the ear, because the accompanying chords used are all in the key of F major , and parallel minor keys (A minor and D minor) could also be the actual tonal center be.

Intro and first half of the verse

Simple accompaniment models that exclusively use diatonic triads are common in many folk music traditions. Well-known songs that resemble The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down in their “folksy” harmonic style are, for example, The House of the Rising Sun or Chan Chan (from Buena Vista Social Club ). However, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down differs from these and many other songs by its own tonal ambivalence. This effect is created by dispensing with a clear dominant chord, which would unambiguously assign the piece to one of the possible keys. The melody of the song has a similar omission in that it does not use either of the two notes B or B that would be expected to guide a piece in C or F major .

Second half of the verse

The fact that related major and minor chords are placed next to each other without connecting or preparatory dominant tones results in sound effects similar to fallacy, which conspicuously correspond to the fluctuation of the text's emotional message between sadness, nostalgia, pride and inflexibility.

Just as the text in the chorus finds a less individual, more general statement, the musical stylistic devices also change: the oscillation between the tonic chord C and its subdominant Fmaj7, i.e. the plagal cadence , is traditionally so inextricably linked in tonal music with sacred music that this phrase is also known as the "amen cadence". The chord progression leading to the end suggests church music models in a similar way , which colloquially are mostly subsumed under the general terms chorale and gospel .

Chorale-like harmony of the refrain

This underlines the hymn-like character of the melody and the corresponding hints in the text ("all the bells were ringing [...] and all the people were singing"), which of course are less a historical factual report than an expression of the collective perception of the "southerners" understand are.

The hymn effect of the chorus is reinforced by the skillful use of the harmonized background vocals, which are added at some prominent text passages (namely the actual hookline , “the night they drove old Dixie down”, and the final syllable vocals). While such polyphonic, largely homophonic singing is deeply rooted in the tradition of secular and sacred American song, The Band's performance practice is somewhat unusual (if not entirely novel) in that it places Levon Helm's main melody in the lowest voice while Danko and Manuel put falsetting upper voices over it.

Typical polyphonic refrain singing from The Band

Just as the text ends in meaningless syllable chanting without having come to a conclusion, the melody gradually fades away during the last subdominant chord, so the music does not reach its tonic or its root note in the sense of a satisfactory final effect.

reception

Ralph J. Gleason for Rolling Stone

“Nothing that I have read, from Bruce Catton to Douglas Southall Freeman , from Fletcher Pratt to Lloyd Lewis , has brought home to me the overwhelming human sense of history that this song does. The only thing I can relate it to at all is the Red Badge of Courage . It is a remarkable song, the rhythmic structure, the voice of Levon and the bass line with the drum accents and then the heavy close harmony of Levon, Rick and Richard Manuel in the theme, make it seem impossible that this isn't some oral tradition material handed down from father to son straight from that winter of '65 to today. "

Susan Lydon for The New York Times

"What's important is not what they mean when you figure them out, but the feeling their images suggest and evoke in the listener. "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," a poignantly beautiful ballad with Levon Helm's Arkansas voice at its most mellow, is a song about the Civil War. It doesn't express a particular point of view about the Civil War, it only suggests some of the feelings that were at stake. "

Awards

Cover versions (selection)

Joan Baez (1963)
with original text
  • In 1971, the folk singer Joan Baez had her version of the title, her first and only US top ten hit (number 3). However, Baez allowed himself some textual changes that partially distorted the meaning of the title, so "Stoneman's cavalry" became "so much cavalry" and "Robert E. Lee" became "the 'Robert E. Lee'". Hoskyns wrote in Across the Great Divide : "Two years later, Joan Baez recorded a terrible version of 'Dixie' that seemed to turn Robert E. Lee into a steamboat ..." In a Rolling Stone interview with Kurt Loder , Baez stated that Not having had any written text, instead she would have sung the text as she understood it.
  • Other cover versions - some of them on live albums - are available from Bob Dylan , Johnny Cash , John Denver , Jerry García , The Black Crowes , Richie Havens and Johnny Logan .
with changed text
  • In 1972 the 15-year-old singer Juliane Werding had a number one hit in Germany with Am Tag als Conny Kramer died , which deals with drug abuse , which stayed in the top ten for 14 weeks and sold over a million copies . Hans-Ulrich Weigel wrote the text.
  • In 1986 the German punk band Die Goldenen Zitronen sang the title On the day when Thomas Anders died, alluding to Werding's hit .

literature

  • KG Johansson: The Real Rock Book , Warner / Chappell Music Scandinavia, Stockholm 1998

Web links and sources

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Historio: The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down. April 2011
  2. ^ Robert Palmer: A Portrait of the Band as Young Hawks. Rolling Stone, June 1, 1978.
  3. ↑ a b Barney Hoskyns: Across the Great Divide. The Band and America. UK, February 1993, Viking / Penguin, ISBN 0-670-84144-7 .
  4. ^ Neil Minturn, Michael J. Budds: The Last Waltz of The Band. Pendragon Press, 2005.
  5. ^ Greil Marcus: The Band's Last Waltz - That Train Don't Stop Here Anymore. ( Memento of May 25, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Rolling Stone, December 30, 1976
  6. ↑ Levon Helm: This Wheel's on Fire - Levon Helm and the Story of The Band. Plexus, London, 1993.
  7. ^ Ralph J. Gleason: The Band: The Band - Review. Rolling Stone, October 18, 1969.
  8. ^ Susan Lydon: The Band: Their Theme Is Acceptance of Life. The New York Times, October 12, 1969.
  9. ↑ 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll.
  10. ↑ The RS 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.
  11. ↑ Janet Maslin : Joan Baez: Blessed Are ... - Review. Rolling Stone, October 28, 1971
  12. ↑ Meant is the Mississippi steamship Robert E. Lee, put into service in 1866 .
  13. ^ Kurt Loder: The Rolling Stone Interview. Joan Baez. Rolling Stone, April 14, 1983.
  14. ↑ Chart tracking ( memento of the original from April 29, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on musicline.de @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / musicline.de
  15. ↑ Biography of Hans-Ulrich Weigel ( Memento of the original from August 14, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on gema.de @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.gema.de