This [“The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”] is a song of pain. There were Virgil Caines of the early 1970s who  looked around and they ALSO saw a South that they were starting to find unrecognizable. The landscape and how people lived were shifting. The low hanging fruit here is, of course, to focus on the race. We can’t ignore it. In 1970, we were only six years out from the Civil Rights Act and the end of Jim Crow laws. Whether white southerners like it or not, their past as one of the largest slave societies in world history and as the former Confederacy of the United States will likely never escape them, in part because some people do not want to escape it. 

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