The Band

Fifty years ago this week The Band released their second album, simply titled The Band. It has several songs that are classic rock staples, as well as a vibe of roots music. Robbie Robertson wrote or co-wrote all of the songs, but they all feel like they could have been written one hundred years before.

Listening to the album, I found I liked the songs I had heard before, but those I was unfamiliar with I didn't care for. Some of them, like "Jawbone," seem unfinished (perhaps because it's in 6/4 time, I found it difficult to listen to). But the four or five songs that are well known are that way for a reason.

"Up On Cripple Creek" has our singer headed down to Louisiana to visit a woman who sounds like the woman every man should have:

"Up on Cripple Creek she sends me
If I spring a leak she mends me
I don't have to speak, she defends me
A drunkard's dream if I ever did see one"

In "King Harvest (Has Surely Come)," we hear the stirrings of a farmer's labor movement:

"Corn in the fields.
Listen to the rice when the wind blows 'cross the water,
King Harvest has surely come
I work for the union 'cause she's so good to me;
And I'm bound to come out on top,
That's where she said I should be I will hear every word the boss may say,
For he's the one who hands me down my pay
Looks like this time I'm gonna get to stay,
I'm a union man, now, all the way"

By far my favorite song on the record is the classic "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," sung by Levon Helm. It is an empathetic look at the South during the Civil War, which is a tough trick to play. Thought it cottons to the romantic, "Lost Cause" attitude about the war, I find the story, told by Virgil Caine, to be a compelling one. He's not interested in slavery, he's just trying to stay alive.

"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"

I hear this on the radio all the time and turn it up every time I do. Everything about it is perfect, from the old-timey piano sound to Helm's plaintive voice. I'm not one to celebrate the Confederacy or its soldiers, but it is a reminder that it is estimated that less than one percent of Confederate citizens owned slaves.

What's kind of amazing is that Robertson, a Canadian, was able to write an album that tapped into the American psyche.