Posted on 07/12/2020 7:22:11 PM PDT by jacknhoo
The late 60s saw a number of great artists looking back into the American past to find a new musical direction. Bob Dylan started the trend releasing John Wesley Harding, the album that produced All Along the Watchtower. The Byrds followed with Sweetheart of the Rodeo, a classic of Americana, and the Band released Music from Big Pink, the record that influenced countless musicians. For me the song that best symbolizes that chapter in music history is The Band’s The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down from their second album released in 1969, The Band.
(Excerpt) Read more at musicaficionado.blog ...
Hasn’t that been banned?
I’ve always enjoyed Joan Baez’s version too.
I understand she’s an acquired taste.
Not everyone likes her persistent vibrato at every ending of every line in the verses.
The Band took an obscure history lesson and spun it into gold with this song. It’s a great song, by both performers. Almost cinematic in the narration.
Great song about loss and suffering, even us New England yankee descendant of Union soldiers appreciate the solace in the lyrics.
Can't sing this song anymore, so sad.
mark
I was not impressed with anything on “Sweetheart of the Rodeo”
Joan cannot sing it? Probably not the same way.
The voice does age with the rest of the body.
“I’ve always enjoyed Joan Baez’s version too.”
I remember some great nights and great get togethers with some real people in South Georgia in the early 70s with Joan Baez’s The Night they Drove Old Dixie Down. Well I remember some parts of those nights.. Great times with real people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_eK9ERNChI
Good Times, huh?
When I was in high school in Louisiana, our main rivals were the “Rebels”. Our high school band would play that song at football games.
Great fun!!!
“Good Times, huh?”
Wild hog ribs over the coals, white bread and girls made tader salad and a keg sitting is wash tub of ice... and spinning records.
Lyrics have never made any sense to me.
Back with my wife in Tennessee
And one day she said to me
“Virgil, quick! Come see
There goes Robert E. Lee”
Now I don’t mind, I’m chopping wood
And I don’t care if the money’s no good
Just take what you need and leave the rest
But they should never have taken the very best
There goes THE Robert E Lee. That’s what you hear in the song. A riverboat. Lee was never in Tennessee during the war.
Joan’s version of this song it just too good for me to really like any other versions. She knew how to actually put emotion into the lyrics and make them lifelike. It is like she actually experienced it.
The most successful version of the song was released by Joan Baez in 1971. It peaked at number three on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the US in October that year and spent five weeks atop the easy listening chart.[11] Billboard ranked it as the No. 20 song for 1971. The version reached number six in the pop charts in the UK in October 1971. The song became a Gold record.
The Baez recording had some changes in the lyrics.[12] Baez later told Rolling Stone’s Kurt Loder that she initially learned the song by listening to the recording on the Band’s album, and had never seen the printed lyrics at the time she recorded it, and thus sang the lyrics as she had (mis)heard them. In more recent years in her concerts, Baez has performed the song as originally written by Robertson.[13]
Chart performance
AmTag als Conny Kramer Starb (the day that Conny Kramer died)--Juliane Werding (1972)
We lay in the grass dreaming,
Our heads full of crazy ideas.
Then he said just for fun,
"Come, let's take a trip."
But the smoke tasted bitter,
Yet Conny told me what he saw:
A sea of light and colors.
We didn't suspect what would happen soon after.
Refrain
The day that Conny Kramer died,
And all the bells were ringing.
The day that Conny Kramer died,
And all his friends were crying for him
That was a black day
Because inside myself, a world was shattered.
He often promised, "I'll quit."
That gave me new hope,
And I told myself,
With love, everything will be all right
But the joints turned into trips,
There was no stop on the crooked path.
People started to talk,
But no one offered Conny help.
Refrain
On his last time, he said,
"Now, I can see heaven."
I screamed at him, "Oh, come back!"
But he could no longer understand.
I didn't even have tears anymore,
I had just lost everything I had.
Life just keeps moving on,
All that is left for me is the flowers on his grave
Refrain
The song was written by Robbie Robertson, who spent about eight months working on it.[1] Robertson said he had the music to the song in his head and would play the chords over and over on the piano but had no idea what the song was to be about. Then the concept came to him and he researched the subject with help from the Band’s drummer Levon Helm, a native of Arkansas.[2][1] 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.”
The lyrics tell of the last days of the American Civil War, portraying the suffering of the protagonist, Virgil Caine, a poor white Southerner. Dixie is the historical nickname for the states making up the Confederate States of America.[3] The song’s opening stanza refers to one of George Stoneman’s raids behind Confederate lines attacking the railroads of Danville, Virginia at the end of the Civil War in 1865:
it was great. This version by the band was also great
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