The Band - Unfaithful Servant

Unfaithful servant, I hear you're leavin' soon in the mornin'
What did you do to the lady, that she's gonna have to send you away?
Unfaithful servant, you don't have to say you're sorry
If you done it just for the spite, or did you do it just for the glory?
Like a stranger you turned your back
Left your keep and gone to pack
But bear in mind who's to blame for all the shame
She really cared
The time she spared
And the home you shared

Unfaithful servant, I can hear the whistle blowin'
Yes, that train is a-comin' and soon you'll be a-goin'
Need us not bow our heads, for we won't be complainin'
Life has been good to us all, even when that sky is rainin'
To take it like a grain of salt
Is all I can do and it's no one's fault
It makes no diff'rence if we fade away
It's just as it was
And it's much to cold for me to stay

Goodbye to that country home, so long, lady I have known
Farewell to my other side, I'd best just take it in stride
Unfaithful servant, you'll learn to find your place
I can see it in your smile, and, yes, I can see it in your face
The mem'ries will linger on
But the good old days, they're all gone
Oh, lonesome servant, can't you see
We're still one and the same
Just you and me

 
It is pretty remarkable how much commentary has been done on the texts for the Brown Album by people who have clearly thought long and hard on what they can draw from the words.*

This song, one of the best that Robbie Robertson wrote,  has three characters in it, the "unfaithful servant," the singer-narrator  who is certainly a very close friend of the US, a member of the same household that they share with "the lady" who the  unfaithful servant did something to that leads to his dismissal. Though we haven't been told the gender of the U.S. so that's left to speculation.  I have to say until I read someone making that point this morning it hadn't occurred to me that the servant could have been female. 

I'd assumed because they were represented as leaving alone and from the time I pictured, that the servant was a male who had made some kind of sexual advance that The Lady didn't want or who had had a sexual relation with her that was ended through discovery or it being broken off on unfriendly terms or that he'd been unfaithful with someone else.  Though it could have been a financial wrong, perhaps one mixed with sexual issues.  But I can't believe it was over money.  The singer doesn't seem to know exactly what it was because he is asking what the US did that led to the break up of a happy household that he's mourning the end of.  

He clearly feels broken up over the US leaving, regretting the good old days that are past and gone. He also seems hurt that he isn't regretting leaving, the US is smiling and he figures his friend is going to make out all right wherever he lands.  I concluded that the narrator was a fellow servant who, out of loyalty to The Lady or maybe her family or maybe the land, is remaining in the household permanently damaged by that rupture.    

The commentary I've read on it universally places the location as in the American South, partly due to the accent used to sing it, and all of the songs on the album, though I believe only the drummer Levon Helm was from the South.  Clearly, it's a product of the imagination of a Canadian guy who was recreating lives from a different place than Toronto.  I haven't heard of any Southerners complaining that it or the songs explicitly naming their narrators as Southerners was an act of cultural appropriation so I guess they find it as convincing as I do.  If someone wanted to write in that depth about people in rural New England with that much insight and sympathy and respect and so convincingly, I don't care if they come from anywhere.  Believe me, in Maine we've experienced cultural expropriation of the opposite kind.
 
It's one of the greatest song of the last 50 years that I know.  I've never heard anyone sing it but Rick Danko and am not sure I want to hear anyone else sing it, he did it so perfectly - reportedly on the first take that got put on the disc.   If I sang I don't think I'd try to sing it. 

* The commentary on the words is generally a lot better than the commentary on the instrumental playing.   As a musician, I don't find that at all useful, it diminishes the experience instead of explaining it - if you could explain it you wouldn't have to do it in music.  It's only annoying.