Written by a Canadian who visited Helena, Arkansas with Levon Helm in 1965. He said the people still seemed to be defeated. Levon said he helped write it to make sure Lee was respected. By the way, listen to The Band’s version on The Last Waltz.
> Levon said he helped write it to make sure Lee was respected.
Wikipedia does say, “The song was written by Robbie Robertson...In his 1993 autobiography, This Wheel’s on Fire, Helm wrote, ‘Robbie and I worked on “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” up in Woodstock. I remember taking him to the library so he could research the history and geography of the era and make General Robert E. Lee come out with all due respect.’”
One odd thing about the mention of “Robert E. Lee”: “Back with my wife in Tennessee, when one day she called to me / ‘Virgil, quick, come and see, there goes the Robert E. Lee.’” [The Band] I’ve always assumed that meant a riverboat named in his honor, and though some lyrics sites leave off the “the”, you can clearly hear it in the videos of both The Band and Joan Baez.
(If such a riverboat still existed, though, we’d soon have demands that it be renamed.)