Well, the song is just tremendous, almost regardless of the vocalist-—this from a northland Scandanavian boy who can’t carry a tune alone in the car with the stereo cranked.
I know Levon Helm has the bonafides, and legions of fans of the song to back him up, but the recording...it’s like the equipment is second-rate. Levon sounds to me like they put a sack over his head.
Joan Baez was and is a not-so-poor little leftist (bet she wouldn’t touch the tune these days with a 20-pounder Parrott rifle) but her glorious voice so carries the profoundly womanly pain in the song—the unbent, steely southern wife or mother kept from the battle (lucky for the Northern aggressors) but cursed with first-hand grief and loss...it underscores for me everything that a northerner can’t and never quite will understand about the South, to this day.
Robert E. Lee supposedly said that “without music, there would have been no army.” Not to be flip, or ‘appropriative,’ as they say these days, but I’ve always thought that if General Lee had ridden into battle with the Allman Brothers playing “Jessica” as his fight song, we’d all be speaking Confederate today.
Add Joan Baez’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” and we’d all be singing Confederate too. Which would beat the hell out of what we got.
That was so beautifully stated that I’m going to finally forgive you for not liking Levon’s version the best.