Writer: Robbie Robertson
Producers: The Band and John Simon
Recorded: July 22, 1969 in Hollywood, California
Released: September 22, 1969
| Players: | Levon Helm — vocals, percussion Robbie Robertson — guitar, vocals Rick Danko — bass, vocals Richard Manuel — piano, vocals Garth Hudson — keyboards |
| Album: | The Band (Capitol, 1969) |
Singer-guitarist Robbie Robertson, the Band's chief songwriter, had been working on “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” for several months before the group recorded it. “I had the music in my head for (the song) and had no idea what the song was about. I was just humming it and playing these chords, and I liked the chord progression that I'd come up with. At some point, (the concept) blurted out of me. Then I went and I did some research and I wrote the lyrics to the song.”
The song deals with the end of the Civil War from the Southern point of view, and on the advice of his bandmates, Robertson–a native Canadian–toured through the American South to get a feel for what he wanted to write about.
“In one of the verses I mentioned something about (Abraham) Lincoln in there, and Levon (Helm) said, 'You can't do that.' From the Southern point of view, it was, 'Hey, this is the guy that was trying to tell us we can't have slaves,' so Levon just wised me up to that…He explained to me the politics of that period in a Cracker fashion that I (understood).”
Robertson says his travels to the South also gave him a sense of the kind of theme he wanted to distill in the song: “When I first went down South, I remember that a quite common expression would be, 'Well, don't worry, the South's gonna rise again.' At one point when I heard it, I thought it was kind of a funny statement, and then I heard it another time and I was really touched by it. I thought, 'God, because I keep hearing this, there's pain here, there is sadness here.' In Americana land, it's kind of a beautiful sadness.”
The Band, considered by many critics to be the group's defining musical triumph, hit Number Nine on the Billboard 200 chart (the group's first top 10 album) and Number 25 on the U.K. album chart.
Like its debut album, Music From Big Pink, the Band chose to record The Band in a house–this time, in the pool house of the mansion owned by Sammy Davis Jr. in California's Hollywood Hills.
In order to record the album, the Band had the chimney capped and the doors boxed out and covered with blankets.
In the summer before the release of The Band, the group performed at both the original Woodstock festival and with Bob Dylan at the Isle Of Wight Festival Of Music in England.
In the wake of the album's success and of the Band's burgeoning reputation, the group was placed on the cover of Time magazine's January 12, 1970, issue as flag-bearers for “The New Sound Of Country Rock.”