[May 16th
marks the 50th
anniversary of the releases of Pet Sounds
and Blonde on Blonde, two iconic
1960s rock albums. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy those artists and other 60s
rock icons and songs. Please share your own rocking responses (or hazy
memories) for a righteous crowd-sourced post!]
On a troubling 60s
song, and why those problems do and don’t matter.
“The Night They Drove Old
Dixie Down” is a song on The Band’s 1969
self-titled second album (sometimes known as The Brown Album), but it feels
very much as if it could have been released a century earlier. That’s certainly
part of the point, as many of the album’s songs (such as the Depression-era farm
song “King Harvest (Has
Surely Come)”) seek to capture Americana and its histories and stories in
both subject and sound. But at the same time, “Night” doesn’t just portray the
Civil War and its aftermath in an Americana sort of way—it does so very fully
through the Lost Cause narrative, a sense of nostalgia and loss associated with
the Confederacy’s defeat. That’s particularly clear when the song reflects the post-war
deification of Robert E. Lee, in these lines: “Back with my wife in
Tennessee, when one day she called to me/‘Virgil, quick, come see, there goes
Robert E Lee’/Now I don't mind choppin' wood, and I don't care if the money's
no good/Ya take what ya need and ya leave the rest/But they should never have
taken the very best.”
That Lost Cause narrative
of Robert E. Lee’s destruction exemplifies why it’s still a problem for a rock
song from 1969 to create and give voice to this 19th century character’s
perspective. After all, while both the Civil War and Lee are parts of the
distant past, the narratives and images of them remain ongoing and vital
elements of the American present. We’ve seen far too many tangible
and horrible illustrations of that fact over the last decade of American
life, but in many ways the resurgence of such Neo-Confederate
sentiment began in direct response to the Civil Rights Movement and other
1960s shifts. So for a 1969 song by a popular rock band to express such a Lost
Cause take on Lee and the War (one that, to be sure, never mentions race or
slavery at all—but if anything that’s even more frustrating, as it allows for
the pretense that Old Dixie was centrally defined by anything else) was, to say
the least, a deeply problematic choice, and can’t simply be dismissed as
offering a slice of Americana or the folk tradition or the like.
And yet. Without
minimizing any of those issues, I think it’s important to note that one of the
central forms of rock (and all popular) music has long been the adoption of a
certain speaker and perspective, one not at all the same as that of the artist
or band and given it’s own room to exist and breathe. Steve
Earle most definitely isn’t John Walker Lindh (the “American Taliban”), and
yet “John Walker’s Blues”
is sung in the first-person. More saliently for this post, Bruce Springsteen is
(I hope and believe) very different from notorious serial
killer Charles Starkweather, and yet “Nebraska” is sung in the
first-person. Neither of those songs, nor most other first-person ones, would
work nearly as well or be nearly so compelling and evocative if they weren’t in
that first-person voice, which allows for an intimacy (even, perhaps
especially, an uncomfortable intimacy) that’s otherwise impossible to capture. I
don’t think “The Night” comes anywhere close to the intimacy, nor the power, of
the Earle and Springsteen songs—but contextualizing it in relationship to them
can help us understand why they did what they did, even if we can and should
still critique it as well.
Next
RockStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Responses to this post or other RockStudyings you’d share?
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