The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down

Robertson wrote it and Helm sang it. It follows Virgil Caine, a poor white Southerner who served on the Danville railroad until Stoneman's cavalry tore up the tracks in the last winter of the Civil War. Robertson said it took about eight months, because he had the chords at the piano and no idea what the song was about until the rest came to him one day. Helm, who was from Arkansas, helped with the history and advised Robertson to cut a verse about Abraham Lincoln.

Sound On Sound describes the recording in the Hollywood Hills pool house. Robertson played acoustic guitar, Hudson organ and a little trumpet, Manuel piano and the high harmony, and Danko bass and the middle harmony. Helm sang and played drums together, because each verse ends in a drum roll where the tempo stops and the group had to land on the chorus as one. The mix was made in New York by Simon and Tony May.

Rolling Stone ranked it 245th on its 2004 list of the 500 greatest songs, and Pitchfork named it the 42nd best song of the 1960s. Writing in Rolling Stone in October 1969, Ralph J. Gleason compared its sense of history to The Red Badge of Courage. Some commentators in the twenty-first century have questioned its Confederate viewpoint, and others have defended it as an anti-war song. The Band played it on Rock of Ages and in The Last Waltz. Joan Baez's version reached 3 on the Hot 100 on 2 October 1971 and 6 in Britain. She had learned it from the record and sang some lines as she heard them.