We Can Succinctly Outline Some Points of Canadianness Converging with Southernness in an Array of Band Songs, Including
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We can succinctly outline some points of Canadianness converging with southernness in an array of Band songs, including: • musicality :The Band’s amazing amalgams of blues, jazz, rockabilly, country, folk, R&B/soul, blues-based rock, and gospel that summon variegated ideas of southernness. Toronto-born guitarist and primary songwriter Robbie Robertson proposes a somewhat misty-eyed account of the U.S. South as inherently seeping music. When he first arrived down on the Mississippi Delta from Canada in the early 1960s, he realized it was “the middle of the wagon of rock ‘n’ roll . Everything was more musically oriented, and 1 didn’t know if it was coming from the people or just from the air.” Probably not. But the music often is driven by and in turn drives this mythos of autochthonous southern musicality, in the teeth of the highly, meticulously constructed impetus of The Band’s applications, or appropriations, of said “natural-born” regional musicality. Their arch command of heightened artifice, to the point of self-consciously garish showmanship, in their reproductions of southern musicality is evident, for instance, in “The W. S. Walcott Medicine Show,” which simulates the swirling energy and surrealist fare of F. S. Wolcott’s Original Rabbit Foot’s Minstrels, a traveling show that Helm witnessed when he was a boy down South.• • rurality: The un-urban and un-urbane are key in The Band’s songs, set both North and South. Country living comes with costs (difficult economic conditions) and benefits (less cluttered surroundings and ecological beauty and peace). Such touting of foundational ruralness appears notably in “King Harvest (Has Surely Come),” which references attempts by the Trade Union Unity League, a branch of the Communist Party USA, to organize farmers into unions in the Depression-era South. In “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,’’Virgil Kane declares his allegiance to an agrarian life passed down through the generations: “Like my father before me / I will work the land.” The forced immigrants in “Acadian Driftwood” resettle south of the Canadian border to work in “the sugar fields just up from New Orleans,” although the speaker eventually sets his “compass north” to return to Canada because he’s got “winter in [his] blood.” 126 / Turner.