I think this is basically right, although I wish it had grappled a little more with how pervasive uncritical thinking about the Confederacy and Reconstruction was in American culture, including among people you would expect to know more than songwritershttps://slate.com/culture/2020/08/night-they-drove-old-dixie-down-band-confederate.html …
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To take a more obscure roughly contemporaneous example, Zevon's great eponymous album starts with one of many lionizations in American popular music of Frank and Jesse James, who were just reprehensible Confederate thugs:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LumGif_cmAU …
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We don't talk about it because (while WZ's book of great songs is much deeper than Robbie's) "Dixie Down" is melodically gorgeous and just musically "Frank and Jesse James" is the weakest cut on the record, but turning confederate assholes into heroes is a long tradition.
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Having seen the first reply, I should note however that on this narrow point in his otherwise excellent piece
@jack_hamilton is wrong -- the lyric is "there goes THE Robert E. Lee." It's about the *steamboat*, not about the slave-torturing general.pic.twitter.com/UEF1hpFrEf
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Anyway, the larger context here is reflected by the fact that a future liberal president won the Pulitzer Prize putting his name on a book called "Profiles in Courage" to celebrate mostly a bunch of racist assholes. The Dunning School had a LONG tail.https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/jfks-profiles-in-courage-has-a-racism-problem-what-should-we-do-about-it …
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Neither Robertson nor Zevon (nor Woody Guthrie etc. etc.) meant to celebrate the Confederacy or its ideology per se, but when a lot of liberal historians took Lost Cause mythology for granted it was going to filter down into pop culture.
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Replying to @HeerJeet @LemieuxLGM
Lol there’s literally no subject that Jeet won’t use to try to get a dig in at the Clintons.
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I'm going to go with Ta-Nehisi Coates on African-American history rather than Ratfink Maloney.https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/hillary-clinton-reconstruction/427095/ …
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