Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Entertainment/2015 May 21

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May 21

The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down: question about lyrics?

• The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down

While the general theme in "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" is fairly clear, if you listen to the lines more closely, they seem to have been thrown together in a pretty haphazard way, just for the sake of the rhymes. Sometimes they don't even make much sense. For example: Who are all the people who were supposedly singing "na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na"? Union soldiers? You wouldn't call them "all the people" then, would you, as if there was no one else left? On the other hand there doesn't seem to be any good reason for either Confederate soldiers or southern civilians to go "na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na"... Of course none of this would be especially shocking in the realm of popular music where logical consistency is hardly ever a priority, but since, contrary to most songs, this one seems to have a more focussed historical topic, I keep wondering if there might be something I might have missed. Contact Basemetal here 14:07, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

See Non-lexical vocables in music. --Jayron32 14:10, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. Interesting article but unfortunately it did not help me figure out who were singing "na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na". But yes, "na" is, here, a nonsense syllable. That much I'd figured out. I didn't think they were singing about sodium. Contact Basemetal here 14:27, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

Art is not meant to be a bare reporting of facts. Songs are composed with mind to not just the historical veracity of their content, but also to artistic concerns such as rhythm and meter and Prosody. We joke about someone being able to "sing the phone book", but really, the art of writing and performing a song is much more complex and nuanced than merely reporting facts. --Jayron32 14:37, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

One possible interpretation is that both the bells and the people, ringing and singing, belong to the other side, the one wallowing in triumph (close to "nyah nyah" perhaps), but that's just one way of hearing it. ---Sluzzelin talk 14:48, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

(e/c with above post, which says pretty much the same thing) See this article about the song [1], which includes (about halfway down) a few bits of speculation (taken from the Band fan forum) about the meaning of the chorus. Basically, some people think it's the losing side, the South, lamenting their defeat, but some others think it's the victors, the North, singing to celebrate their own victory. You're not going to get a more authoritative reading, unless you ask Robbie Robertson, and probably not even then. --Viennese Waltz 14:50, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

I recommend the link provided above by Viennese Waltz to anyone interested in the lyrics of this song and how much you can read into them if you truly pay attention. Clearly Jayron is right this is a song, not a scholarly paper. Indeed the point of the lyrics of the song was to raise an emotion in the listener through "echoing" the popular (and possibly distorted) memory of a 100 years old (but still fairly significant) historical event, not to pass on factually accurate information, but it does not follow that the facts of history meant nothing to the songwriter. Read the discussion. Thanks again to Viennese Waltz. Contact Basemetal here 22:35, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

Maybe the same "na" as in "na na na na hey hey goodbye". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:00, 21 May 2015 (UTC)