"Then, as if to match this anachronistic sound, their lyrics were written from the perspective of various characters in distant-past American settings..."

"... Dust Bowl farmers ('King Harvest [Has Surely Come]'), Civil War soldiers ('The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down'), Manifest Destiny fulfillers ('Across the Great Divide').... ... The Band is an album about America as written by a Canadian band (with the notable exception of Helm, who was from Arkansas). And it’s within the complications of that dynamic that perhaps The Band’s best song, 'The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,' lives, wrought with a particular type of humanity and heartbreak that’s increasingly hard to reckon with, given that its foundation lies within the perspective of a Confederate.... These stories weren’t really theirs to begin with -- they were just there to be plucked. And part of what makes it such a compelling, enduring, and difficult artifact of popular music to grapple with is this feeling that it’s a document of the country’s thorny past without being a strict endorsement of it."

From "Fifty Years of 'The Band,' an Album that Didn't Fit the Mold Then or Now" (Billboard).

Here, you can listen to the "Last Waltz" performance of "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down." This much-up-voted comment is more enlightening than Billboard's dumb explanation for dummies (that the song isn't "a strict endorsement" of America's "thorny past"):

---I was a young urban Black kid going to a suburban school. A White friend played this for me in his car. On a cassette.
----I almost cried right there, because the level of pain and stress in the lyrics. As a Northerner they did not teach us anything about the aftermath of that war.
------Forgive me, but I thought Levon was Black. Just the grit, power and Southern soul in his voice.
2018------It still moves me to tears. Absolutely the best history lesson of the post Civil War South.

I remember — as a college student — staring at that picture on album cover, listening to the music, and feeling like the men had magically arrived from the past and were bringing us song stories from the 19th century. It wasn't easy, in 1969, to look up who they actually were and why they were singing like this. You just had the music and the notions and images that arose in your mind. These were so powerful to me that I don't really like to read the true story now. The experience of the art was already everything.