The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down

From The Band album.  Words and music by Robbie.

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 Cain back up
When he's in defeat 

Here's a perspective from 1978 by Jonathan Taplin, the Band's tour manager at the time (later a Hollywood film producer and then Director of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California Annenbergy School for Communication and Journalism).

It was May and they'd just finished it the night before. They said it'd come out fast and hard and clean. It was just the most moving experience I'd had for, God, I don't know how long. Because for me, being a Northern liberal kid who'd been involved in the Civil Rights movement and had a whole attitude towards the South, well I loved the music but I didn't understand where white Southerners were coming from. And to have it all in just three and a half minutes, the sense of dignity and place and tradition, all those things … Well, the next day after I'd recovered, I went to Robbie and asked him, "How did that come out of you?" And he just said that being with Levon so long in his life and being in that place at that time … It was so inside him that he wanted to write the song right at Levon, to let him know how much those things meant to him.

Levon's vocal from The Last Waltz surpasses the studio version.

Whatever you do, don't listen to the Joan Baez cover which, along with botching the lyrics, completely misses the point of the song.