harmonic progression (13. 412)

Via Web Curios, we are directed to this handy reference calendar in The Year in Songs. Whilst incomplete as not every date has been celebrated or at least mentioned in music—maybe something that needs to be remedied, we quite liked the concept, only able to summon up a paucity of two specific tunes, Ode to Billy Joe and of course the perennial favourite by Earth, Wind and Fire changing the mind of pretenders. For instance, we are informed that on Sunday “by May the tenth, Richmond had fell,” as the lyrics to The Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” the narrative of social and economic distress experienced by a poor white southerner, Virgil Caine, during the last year of the American civil war relate. Performed at Woodstock with reprise by Joan Baez (as the audience wasn’t too enthused for their set), the song written by a Canadian and played by an almost exclusively Canadian band was hardly an endorsement of slavery or the Lost Cause ideology of the Confederacy but rather theretofore, ironically, the first and only cultural artefact that addressed the division of the American republic and delivered an anti-war message meant to be mapped onto contemporary conflicts.