Levon Helm - heart and soul of The Band

I have been a fan of The Band since I first heard them back in the early 70s. Eric Clapton and George Harrison regarded The Band as the best rock and roll band. Ever.

My appreciation has grown over the years as my own understandings of musicianship and band playing have matured with experience. The Band were either the tightest loose playing band or the loosest tight playing band. Their repertoire captured a glimpse of traditional America with a musical relevance to modern times. Extraordinary songs like The Weight, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, King Harvest Will Surely Come, played with extraordinary music.

The Band paid their dues touring with Ronnie Hawk as The Nighthawks all across the touring circuit from the South to Canada over several years. Indeed, all but one of them was Canadian - Levon Helm. Levon was raised in Arkansas, the son of a poor cotton cropper. Levon sings as well as playing drums, mandolin, fiddle and guitar. His lead vocal graces their greatest songs. It was though he absorbed all the color, rhythm, and flavour of traditional rural folk music of the South and mixed it in a gumbo with the meat and potatoes of the power and individual brilliance of the other band members.

Levon once described his playing style in terms of dancing and weaving around the lyric so the vocals could breath. To my delight I recently discovered that Levon had released his first solo album in 35 years. Dirt Farmer won a Grammy this year for Best Traditional Folk Album. Every song is a winner, and the playing is superb. Levon's light touch supports and drives an all-acoustic ensemble with irresistible rhythms and feel. Check out Calvary in the attached mp3. A rather fitting choice for our autumnal Easter season in these here parts.

Rolling Stone had this to say about Dirt Farmer:

The sole American in the Band, singer-drummer Levon Helm --the son of an Arkansas cotton farmer -- knew firsthand the hard labor, family ties and Dixie fireside tales that were the roots and soil of guitarist Robbie Robertson's songs. On Dirt Farmer, Helm goes home to the tunes and fables of his boyhood, including the traditional "Blind Child," the Stanley Brothers standard "False -Hearted Lover Blues" and A.P. Carter's cheeky "Single Girl, Married Girl," singing them next to rough modern diamonds by Steve Earle and Buddy and Julie Miller. The settings are vintage and natural, how the Band might have sounded in Big Pink during a blackout --fiddle and spindly acoustic guitar by ex-Bob Dylan sideman Larry Campbell, Helm's own mandolin and roadhouse-swing drumming, and porch-choir harmonies featuring Helm's daughter, Amy. Levon's vocals are a welcome miracle. His victory over throat cancer cost him some of his old soulful weight. But in "Poor Old Dirt Farmer," a Cajun waltz about a man left with only stones for harvest, Helm's drawling howl is heavy with the outrage and sorrow of someone with a deep connection to the land and those who live by it.