Alabama singer-songwriter Early James tells us why he rewrote the lyrics to 'The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,' the Band's 1969 song about the fall of the Confederacy
“I hope we piss off the right people by changing these words,” he said before King and his band got rolling alongside him. James went on to deliver a version of the Band’s song with enough key lyrics altered to transform it from an elegy for the Lost Cause to a forceful argument for leaving those lies in the dirt. 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.
As a young child, he attended a private elementary school — in part, he says, “because my dad didn’t want me to go to school with black people.” After his parents split up, he ended up transferring to a more integrated public school. He remembers one history teacher around ninth grade who was particularly fond of Confederate nostalgia. “He would say Robert E. Lee was a military genius, say that he didn’t own slaves — even though! He’d say it was all about states’ rights.
At other times, the prejudice he grew up around took more subtle forms. “Racism got brushed under the rug growing up,” he says. “Now it’s finally a time when at least my friends in certain parts of the South are actually saying, ‘No, dude, I don’t want to be around you,’ or telling people to shut up if they’re racist. When I was a kid, if someone would make a joke using the N-word, people would laugh just to not have uncomfortable silence. That doesn’t fly anymore, which is nice.
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