“The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” by The Band

Robbie Robertson wrote "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" for The Band's second album, the self-titled one from 1969, and he gave the lead vocal to Levon Helm, which was the right call. It's told in the first person by a poor white Southerner in the last year of the Civil War, a man watching his world come apart around him, and Helm sings it with a weary, weathered dignity that makes a century-old defeat sound like yesterday's news.

The Band produced it with John Simon, and the arrangement moves like a slow funeral march that keeps threatening to turn into a hymn. It has since landed on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest songs, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll, and Time's All-Time 100.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.