On this date in 1865, Jefferson Davis was attending Sunday services at St. Paul's Episcopal Church on Grace Street in Richmond when he received word that Petersburg had fallen. The president of the Confederacy knew what this meant: Nothing could now stop the Union Army, which was only 25 miles away.
In case he didn't know, Robert E. Lee spelled it out for him. "I think it is absolutely necessary," Lee wrote in a telegram, "that we should abandon our position tonight."
Although he'd previously sent his wife out of the city, Davis' confidence in Lee was so great that he delayed his departure on the Danville train until almost midnight. Davis nearly waited too long. "We took Richmond at 8:15 a.m. this morning," U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Godfrey Weitzel telegrammed Ulysses Grant. Weitzel added that he'd captured many pieces of artillery left behind by the fleeing army. Much of the city was in flames, he said, and Richmond's residents "had received us with enthusiastic expressions of joy."
Why wouldn't they? The city had been put to the torch by the rebels stationed there to defend it, one of the Civil War's many ironies. But did that phrase "the Danville train" strike a chord in your memory? Perhaps you're recalling the song popularized by Joan Baez in the early 1970s, "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down."
"The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" was first recorded by The Band in Los Angeles and released in 1969 by Capitol Records as both a single and a track on an album that included the hit "Up on Cripple Creek," a song the group performed on "The Ed Sullivan Show."
Both numbers were written by guitarist Robbie Robertson with help from Arkansas-born drummer Levon Helm, who was also the group's lead vocalist. Theirs was a distinctive sound, dubbed "country rock" by critics, with songs that mixed sophisticated musicality with interesting lyrical narratives. "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," for instance, relates the fall of Richmond from the Southern point of view. Here are the words to the song's three verses (without the famous chorus):
Virgil Caine is the name, and I served on the Danville train
‘Til Stoneman's cavalry came and tore up the tracks again
In the winter of '65, we were hungry, just barely alive
By May the tenth, Richmond had fell, it's a time I remember, oh so well…
Back with my wife in Tennessee, when one day she called to me,
"Virgil, quick come and see, there goes Robert E Lee!"
Now I don't mind choppin' wood, and I don't care if the money's no good
You take what you need and you leave the rest,
But they should never have taken the very best.
Like my father before me, I will work the land
And like my brother above me, who took a rebel stand
He was just 18, proud and brave, but a Yankee laid him in his grave
I swear by the mud below my feet,
You can't raise a Caine back up when he's in defeat.
As I said, it was an unusual song, especially for 1969, but an arresting one. So much so that Joan Baez covered it two years later in a more upbeat version with slight word variations. Those alterations don't seem to have been deliberate: Baez, a liberal who marched and sang in the civil rights movement, wasn't making editorial changes in the lyrics: She was playing the song by ear -- rendering the words as she heard them on the radio.
Her ear was impressive, but not infallible. In Joan Baez's rendering of the song, which went near the top of the charts, "Stoneman's cavalry" became "so much cavalry."
Baez did away entirely with the May 10 reference, and inserted "the" before Robert E. Lee, which makes the Confederate general and his Army of Northern Virginia into a steamboat -- or something. But the most significant changes come in the last verse.
Like his father before him, Levon Helm's Virgil Caine is a farmer whose brother also worked the land. Joan Baez changes the Caine family's focus: "Like my father before me, I'm a working man," she sings. "And like my brother before me, I took a rebel stand." She also invokes the "blood" below her feet, not the "mud."
Fans of the Band, by and large, do not like these changes. By changing "brother above me" to "brother before me," and the pronoun "who" to "I," Baez not only demotes Virgil's brother from heaven, but makes Virgil himself into a Confederate soldier.
As a native Californian, I'm a little dismayed that Joan Baez (Palo Alto High School class of 1958) didn't recognize the reference to Gen. Stoneman. He's George Stoneman, who was not only a decorated Union Army fighting man but a Democrat who became governor of California after the Civil War.
In fairness, some of Baez's changes made more sense than the original. I mean, what's with that reference by The Band to May 10? That's the date Jefferson Davis was arrested, not when Richmond fell. By May 10, Lee had surrendered at Appomattox, Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated and buried, and Andrew Johnson was president. All of that had happened by mid-April, actually.
And just when did Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia march through Tennessee, you might ask? ("Never" is the answer.) There was a steamboat with that name that plied the Mississippi River after the war, although it didn't make it as far as western Tennessee. In other words, Baez's historical references are no less garbled than the Robbie Robertson-Levon Helm version.
Of course, this is music we're talking about, not a documentary history of the Civil War. And Robertson, who died last summer, was philosophical about it. He was Canadian, by the way, and his mother was part Cayuga and part Mohawk; she was raised on the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario. So he was no "Lost Cause" apologist.
In his 2016 memoir, Robertson described Baez's version as "a much happier, bouncier version of the song than our recording." He allowed as how his wife, Dominique, thought Baez "completely [screwed] up the song, that it was totally out of context." There was enough blame to go around in that regard, however, which is why I'm always reminding my reporters (and myself) of the words of an actual steamboat captain who turned into a pretty fine writer himself.
"The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a larger matter," Mark Twain wrote to a friend. "Tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning."
For loyal readers who know I've used that quotation before -- when writing about Joan Baez and The Band, in fact -- here's an extra credit assignment: Who invoked that admonition a couple of decades before Twain? I'll have the answer in Friday's Morning Note.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon
