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| "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" | |
|---|---|
 Side B of the Canadian single | |
| Single by the Band | |
| from the album The Band | |
| A-side | "Up on Cripple Creek" |
| Released | September 22, 1969 |
| Recorded | 1969 |
| Genre | Folk rock[1][2] |
| Length | 3:33 |
| Label | Capitol |
| Songwriter(s) | Robbie Robertson |
| Producer(s) | John Simon |
| Audio | |
| "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" by The Band on YouTube | |
"The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" is a song written by Robbie Robertson and originally recorded by the Canadian-American roots rock group The Band in 1969 and released on their eponymous second album. Levon Helm provided the lead vocals. The song is a first-person narrative relating the economic and social distress experienced by the protagonist, a poor white Southerner, during the last year of the American Civil War, when George Stoneman was raiding southwest Virginia.
Joan Baez's version peaked at #3 on the Hot 100 on 2 October 1971; it did likewise on the Cashbox Top 100 chart. However, on the Record World Top Singles chart for the week of September 25, 1971, the Baez single hit #1 for one week.[3]
- ^ Pitchfork Staff (August 18, 2006). "The 200 Best Songs of the 1960s". Pitchfork. Retrieved October 12, 2022.
...whose dramatic performance here turns a period piece that could have been a "Schoolhouse Rock" episode into a mournful piece of folk-rock.
- ^ Valdez, Steve (2014). "Folk rock". In Henderson, Lol; Stacey, Lee (eds.). Encyclopedia of Music in the 20th Century. London: Routledge. p. 223. ISBN 978-1-135-92946-6.
- ^ "Record World Top Single Chart" (PDF). Record World. 26 (1267): 35. September 25, 1971.
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