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.
Can't sing this song anymore, so sad.
“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
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
Sorry. The mournfulness and soulfulness of the Band’s version conveys the real sadness and regret of seeing the end of the old southern way of life fading away as the war ground to it’s inevitable destructive end. Baez turned the song into a peppy revolutionary celebration that marched into the future waving flags and portrayed no regret whatsoever. Her uptempo zeal in the performance is totally misplaced, like celebrating Mao’s cultural revolution as a Mardi Gras Parade. Also her non-stop forced vibrato is grating.