Next Up for Cancel Culture-The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.

quote:

---

“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.” In the chorus, instead of mourning that downfall, he sang, “Tonight, we drive old Dixie down.” His most thorough and powerful revision came in the song’s final verse:

Unlike my father before me, who I will never understand
Unlike the others below me, who took a rebel stand
Depraved and powered to enslave
I think it’s time we laid hate in its grave
I swear by the mud below my feet
That monument won’t stand, no matter how much concrete

---