Professors Robertson and Helm

It is a testament to a song's power when it can actually make a person take a different view of the world, especially when that someone is as stubborn as me. The Band, to their everlasting credit, effected just such a change when I first heard their version of "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down". I had actually heard the Joan Baez version somewhere, but it was so languid that none of the lyrics got through to me but the chorus, and I never stopped to thinkof what it was all about.

The Band came onto my radar via a pair of songs, "The Weight" and "Up On Cripple Creek", that were commonly played on classicrock radio. In my big CD-buying binge of my early college days, I picked up a copy of The Best Of The Band. Hearing their version of Dixie was absolutely staggering.

I'm from Pennsylvania, and I had always thought about The Civil War as a positive thing, centered as it was around the abolition of slavery. I never stopped to consider the toll taken on the lives at stake on either side, especially not the South. I always had taken them to be the bad guys in this picture, fighting for a misguidedbelief.

But Robbie Robertson's song, brought to life heartbreakingly by Levon Helm as the song's protagonist Virgil Cane, made me realize that these werejust young boys doing what they were told and fighting for their lives at the behest of others. (It doesn't take a detective to see the resonance of that.) The song spoke for thousands of ghosts, as well as thousands in the South at the time still battling the stigma of being on the "wrong" side. That it was written by a Canadian is a marvel, although it wouldn't have been the same without Helm's Arkansan twang driving the emotion home with sad defiance.

Nothing is ever black and white in this world. Shame on me for not knowing that sooner. And all praise to The Band for teaching me something new.