Was The Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” Racist?

[“Robbie Robertson Dead at 80 (music).”]

By Jerry PDX
thursday, august 10, 2023 at 8:52:00  p.m. edt

Never a fan of The Band, their records never really grabbed me, but “The Weight” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” were two of the most memorable songs of the 70’s. I wondered if “Dixie” was ever accused of being a racist song so I typed in some keywords and, sure enough, the usual hysterics decided it was. Here’s one of them:

https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/5-classic-rock-songs-horribly-racist.html/

Of course it’s not racist, it’s just telling a story that’s a part of history. Pure stupidity to think so.

N.S.: I call such characters the purveyors of gutter culture.

About three years ago, there was a “thing” on npr attacking Jack Ford’s masterpiece of masterpieces, The Searchers (1956).

The producer played a tape of Martin Scorcese asserting that Ford’s picture was not only White supremacist, but that it merely reflected the America of the time in which it was released.

Note that Ford was a racial liberal.

I later purchased a bunch of Ford biographies that I’m still working my through. With each work, however, I would always go first to the author’s discussions of Mr. Roberts (1955) and The Searchers. Thus did I learn that not only was Martin Scorcese an imbecile, but a plagiarist, as well! Scorcese had stolen the idiotic, race-baiting accusation he’d made against The Searchers and the America of 1956 from racist Joseph McBride’s 2001 Ford biography, Searching for John Ford: A Life. There’s an entire anthology book (I’ve forgotten its title) of gutter culture attacks on The Searchers, by writers who smugly condemn John Wayne’s protagonist, Ethan Edwards, as a racist monster.

Never mind that the picture was based on a true incident, the racist commanche massacre of the White Parker family of Texas pioneers, including the gang-rape of the mother and her teenaged daughter, and the kidnapping of young Cynthia Ann Parker, whom the commanche for years hid away from attempts to rescue her. The commanche groomed Cynthia Ann to be the squaw of the chief’s son, married her off to him, and destroyed her life.

Note, too, that in the picture, Ethan Edwards’ mother had also been gang-raped and slaughtered by the commanche.

The gutter culture “scholars” have no interest in such facts.