"The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" is considered one of the highlights of
The Band, the group's second album, which was released in the fall of 1969.
Pitchfork Media named it the forty-second best song of the 1960s. The song is included in the
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's "500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll" and
Time magazine's All-Time 100. In the October 1969 U.S. edition of
Rolling Stone, critic
Ralph J. Gleason explained the song's impact on listeners:Nothing I have read … has brought home the overwhelming human sense of history that this song does. The only thing I can relate it to at all is
The Red Badge of Courage. It's a remarkable song, the rhythmic structure, the voice of Levon and the bass line with the drum accents and then the heavy close harmony of Levon, Richard and Rick in the theme, make it seem impossible that this isn't some traditional material handed down from father to son straight from that winter of 1865 to today. It has that ring of truth and the whole aura of authenticity. that carried supplies for the
Confederate Army at Petersburg. Writing for
Time in 2012 about the Band's performance of "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" during
The Last Waltz, Nate Rawlings said, "Helm was the only southerner in The Band—the rest were Canadian—and he wears the pain and suffering of ordinary people in the South late in the Civil War on his face from the song’s beginning until the final strike of his drum stick".
21st century political criticism Some commentators in the 21st century have questioned whether the song's original lyrics were an endorsement of slavery and the ideology of the
Lost Cause of the Confederacy. In 2009, writing in
The Atlantic, African-American author
Ta-Nehisi Coates characterized the song as "another story about the
blues of Pharaoh," stating that he "can no more marvel at the Band than a Sioux can marvel at the cinematography of
They Died With Their Boots On." In an August 2020 interview in
Rolling Stone, contemporary singer-songwriter
Early James described his changes to the lyrics of the song, while covering it, to oppose the Confederate cause – for example, in the first verse, "where Helm sang that the fall of the Confederacy was 'a time I remember oh so well', James declared it 'a time to bid farewell. A 2020 editorial in
The Roanoke Times argued that the song does not glorify slavery, the Confederacy, or Robert E. Lee, but rather tells the story of a poor, non-slave-holding Southerner who tries to make sense of the loss of his brother and his livelihood. Jack Hamilton, of the
University of Virginia, writing in
Slate, said that it is "an anti-war song first and foremost", pointing to the references to "bells ringing" and "people singing" in the chorus. ==Personnel (The Band version)==