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To get back to Shark’s question in the OP, I’ll start by saying if you’re not familiar with Marcus King, you should be. He’s a young kid from Greenville SC doing some of the best new blues rock out there. And he just turned 25! He’s a baby!

https://marcuskingband.com/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6dwaC5J_YiXXsRCZhqK3yw

So here’s a story and some commentary on woke culture and this song.

Fairly early during Covid, he did a series of four streaming concerts, one of which was a cover of The Last Waltz from start to finish (!!). The guy gets that The Band in general, and that album/event in particular, were An Important Thing. And in general his tribute to The Band was very nicely done.

Here, I see it’s now up on YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3aTpvmXhzw

But here comes the wokeness screws up everything part. When it came time for The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, there was an intro by his friend “Early” James Mullis with some woke statements of “we need to change some of the lyrics because we’re young and thus woke” (heavily paraphrased). The lyrics change didn’t do much for me.

Here is the above concert advanced to this song.
https://youtu.be/Z3aTpvmXhzw?t=4091

The key issue seems to be that someone might see this as a glorification of the Southern cause, and thus because woke we must adjust the song, which I see as completely absurd. This song is a lament of a thoroughly beaten person/cause, and it certainly doesn’t glorify slavery. Virgil Cain is a poor Southern white who never owned a slave, barely made it through the war with his life, his brother dead, and came through it with nothing. And Virgil is lamenting what life has thrown at him and telling the story. It’s not like he was ever in control of events. There is no need to change the lyrics.

I don’t hold this against Marcus and James Mullis. I do hold it against the idiot teachers who didn’t give them enough background in history such that they didn’t understand my summary of the song above. And to the whole woke cancel culture phenomenon, which they’re clearly working to avoid falling afoul of. And I sort of can’t blame them for that.

Again, wokeness screws up everything.

Ping to my previous post.

Regarding Blackberry Smoke, I saw them warm up for Tedeschi-Trucks Band, they’re on my go see if they come around list for sure.

The key issue seems to be that someone might see this as a glorification of the Southern cause,

You're quite right in your well considered reply but as an unreconstructed lost cause-ER I am quite ready to defend the virtues not only of the cause itself but of those who sacrificed so much on its behalf.

Those virtues include a Christian faith, a rooted belief in the virtues of federalism, of home rule and local democracy, a code of honor, defense of homeland and home and a degree of fortitude unimaginable today.

That is not to say that in the sweep of history the defeat of the Confederate cause was not only to be desired but indispensable for the nurturing of the role The United States was destined to render to the whole world in the succeeding centuries in behalf of much of the same virtues that animated "Virgil Caine." If the democracy of the South excluded African-Americans, even enslaved them, the democracy of the North excluded women and virtually enslaved those Indians it did not exterminate, but we do not despise the northern cause for that.

Woke-ness comes from a hubristic attitude that heroes of previous centuries should be judged by our freshly enshrined cultural mores of today.

Finally, I would like to observe that the song was not a genuine folk song that emerged naturally from the cauldron of a devastating Civil War, it is a 20th-century construct-but it is good music. "Virgil Caine" is himself a fictional character, he did not exist. We should no more submit to cloying sentimentality than we should submit to woke-ness

The history of and the (presumed) mindset behind “Dixie” is multi layered and very complex. It’s a very easy song to misinterpret if that is one’s goal. For some of the listening pubic, they took it at face value, liked the performance and that was it. For others, it was a Ballad laden with symbols of pride, defiance and endurance.

Great post. Thanks.