Hey Guys, I got a rather tricky question. Almost everybody knows the song "The Night they drove old Dixie down" (The Band/Joan Baez etc...) Now what troubles me is the question: Who/What is "old dixie"? I'm not too deep into the Civil War affair, so I can't tell whether this was an important person or something else.

If anybody's got a clue, pls tell me ^^ thx, Kiruah

There are a couple meanings;
Old Dixie is what is sometimes referred to as the Old South (slave South). So "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" is the night the North overran the South and won the Civil War.

Another view is that there was a great Southern steamship (forgot the name) and when the North won the Civil War, a bunch of soldiers took the ship and drove it down the Mississippi River and partied on it, hence "all the people were singing, na na na nananana nananananana"

Hell, that sounds reasonable. Thx a lot, this is valuable information to me