Item 1: I've just seen Nissan use Woody Guthrie's song Car Car for their commercial. Take me for a ride in your car car. Sigh.
Item 2: To add insult to injury, some investment company is using In-a-Gadda-da-vita with flowers that look like they were on the record album. Eighth grade was never like this.
Item 3: The only way I can do dishes is to either watch TV or play fairly loud music. Doing dishes in total silence is hell. So yesterday I put on my Best of the Band album and heard how They Drove Old Dixie Down. I'm one of those people who listen to, and remember lyrics.
This song is unapologetically Southern, and Rebel Southern at that. Now, I get sick of the folks down south copping an attitude that their whole lives were ruined by the "War Between the States" and the thinly veiled (and out-and-out blatant) racism that seems to go along with it. The Confederacy lost, it's been over a long time and really folks, get over it.
The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down isn't about that, though. If you listen to the song, you'll see that it is about how war takes away life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness from working people. It's a lament of the farmer, the railroad worker, the working man, not the land and slave-owning plantationers.
Like my father before, I'm a working man,
And like my brother before me, I took the Rebel's stand.
He was just 18, proud and brave, but a Yankee laid him in his grave
And I swear by the mud below my feet, you can't raise a Caine back up when he's in defeat.
—The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, Robbie Robertson
Working men, poor men, poor families, who went to war because they thought it was the right thing to do, the only thing to do. Some probably went because someone in authority said it was the patriotic thing to do, some might have gone for the adventure. I'm sure many went out of desperation, to try to keep what little they had, and not be dragged down to the level of the slaves around them. With the Union soldiers advancing, I think few had a choice.
Not to say there wasn't racism. But The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down isn't about racism or Confederate-flag-waving. It's about the inevitable cost of war.
