Remember When Joan Baez Had a Five-Week No. 1 Hit With a Cover Song?

In 1971, Joan Baez released “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”. The only single from Baez’s Blessed Are… record, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” is also her only No. 1 hit. This song stayed at the top spot on Billboard’s Easy Listening chart for an impressive five weeks.

What some people may not know is that “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” is actually a cover song. In 1969, The Band released this song on their eponymous sophomore album. Written by The Band’s Robbie Robertson, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” became a Top 10 hit in their native Canada.

The song is told from the vantage point of a poor man named Virgil Caine, at the end of the Civil War. The chorus says in part, “The night they drove Old Dixie down / And all the bells were ringin’ / The night they drove Old Dixie down / And all the people were singin.”

Baez did inadvertently change some of the lyrics in this song, which did not hurt her success at all. Baez’s version of this tune gave her a Grammy nomination for Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female. Numerous other artists later also recorded this song, including Johnny Cash, John Denver, and The Charlie Daniels Band with Vince Gill.

The Story Behind “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” by The Band and Joan Baez

The Band’s Levon Helm sings lead on this song. He later revealed that he did have something to do with the creation of this song, although Robertson is the only writer listed.

“Robbie and I worked on ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’ up in Woodstock,” Helm recounted. “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.”

Still, writing the song was not easy for Robertson. He admits it took him a long time to get it just right.

“It took me about eight months in all to write that song,” Robertson later recalled. “I only had the music for it, and I didn’t know what it was about at all. I’d sit down at the piano and play these chords over and over again. And then one day the rest of it came to me. Sometimes you have to wait a song out, and I’m glad I waited for that one.”

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