"The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down".

Learned a new word. Mondegreen. I have a ton of trouble hearing lyrics correctly.

One ton of tomatoes is how I hear an earworm Hispanic song.

Ten feet long is another from a Marshall Tucker song.

So forgive and there go I.

Also the Perfect is the enemy of the good. Best is just boring. 

@bdp24 how do you think the song would be different if a Southern black person had written it?  Let's face it, most Americans don't sing songs lamenting how bad it must have been to be a German in 1945 when the Russians crossed the Oder River.  And it was really bad.

@onhwy61: Oh, it would have been completely different, of course. But then that would be a different song. Am I supposed to defend the Southern white view of the Civil War?! I didn’t write the damn song, I’m just describing it’s creation.

I grew up listening to my dad---born and raised on a farm in South Dakota---use very ethnic slur known to man when referring to African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, The Polish, Jews, Catholics, and every other non-WASP group of people in the world. When John F. Kennedy would appear on our TV screen I would hear him mutter "N*gg*r lover", to which my mom would make her objection very well known.

I had a friend who had moved from San Jose to Santa Cruz in 1965, a real good drummer. In the spring of 1969 he was playing in a Jazz trio, and one afternoon he and the band’s pianist---a black man---made the trip over the Santa Cruz Mountains to pay me a visit. My band happened to be rehearsing in the garage of my father’s house, and the two of them watched and listened as we went through our set.

My father arrived home from work, coming into the house through the garage. When he got to the door into the house he called my name, motioning for me to follow him inside. When we were both inside he ordered me to "Get that n*gg*r out of my garage." Mouth agape, I asked "Are you kidding?!" He assured me he wasn’t. I had the unpleasant task of informing my friend of my dad’s commandment.

After everyone had left, the father went into the garage to make sure, he told me, that "the n*gg*r had not stolen any of my tools." What he didn’t know was that the black man he viewed with such contempt was a professor at The University Of California at Santa Cruz, and was far more intelligent and educated that was he.

In 1975 I was working in a 7-pc. all-white Jump Blues/Swing band, playing up and down the Northern California coast from San Francisco to Monterey. We had a great male singer, whom in that era of long hair, beards, and bell bottom jeans had a pompadour and wore a sharkskin suit on stage. The band decided they wanted to add a female singer, and found a great one in Palo Alto, a "full-figured" black woman.

I had played many gigs in the frat houses on the campus of Stanford University in Palo Alto, which is on the West side of El Camino Real, the old long street that stretches all the way from Southern California to San Francisco. All the frat boys were white, and mostly came from families with money. Directly across El Camino Real from Stanford is East Palo Alto, a low-income neighborhood in which I had never been. That’s where out new female singer lived. Seeing Palo Alto from that side of ECR, and the stark contrast between the West and East sides of Palo Alto, gave me a new appreciation of the fact that segregation was not just a Southern phenomenon. No, not by legal decree, but by economics.

Has everyone seen the film Mississippi Burning?

@bdp24 yes, clearly the song would be different.  I actually like the song, but then again, I like the movie "Gone With the Wind".  However, both present the South and the Civil War in a problematic light.  All I am arguing is that you should take the song within the context of a decades long movement within the United States to paint the South and the Confederacy in a favorable light and as such downplay the evil at its core.  It's hard for me to comprehend but it's 2023 and a major political party leader wants to teach children that slavery was beneficial to the enslaved.

And in no way am I accusing you of anything but being the world's biggest The Band fan.

Sometimes a song is just a song. Is it really necessary to micro-analyze and dissect every song, movie, book and sitcom to the point where it's branded as evil and no longer here to be enjoyed?

I think that we can learn from history without erasing it. That doesn't seem to be what's happening these days.