05/26/2023
Mark Lavon "Levon" Helm was born on May 26, 1940 in Elaine, Arkansas.
He achieved fame as the drummer and one of the lead vocalists for the Band, for which he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994. Helm was known for his deeply soulful, country-accented voice, multi-instrumental ability, and creative drumming style, highlighted on many of the Band's recordings, such as "The Weight", "Up on Cripple Creek", and "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down".
Helm also had a successful career as a film actor, appearing as Loretta Lynn's father in Coal Miner's Daughter (1980), as Chuck Yeager's friend and colleague Captain Jack Ridley in The Right Stuff (1983), as a Tennessee fi****ms expert in Shooter (2007), and as General John Bell Hood in In the Electric Mist (2009).
He was the second of Nell and Diamond Helm's four children. His father was a cotton farmer but also a music lover, and the Grand Ole Opry and King Biscuit Time radio shows were favourites in the Helm household. His father bought him a guitar when he was nine, and he struck up his first musical partnership with his bass-playing sister Linda. The duo regularly won talent contests in local clubs.
Levon, as he would become known, formed his own high school rock'n'roll band, the Jungle Bush Beaters, and at 17 he was invited to perform onstage with Conway Twitty and his Rock Housers band. By now Levon had taken up the drums, having been inspired by Jerry Lee Lewis's sticksman Jimmy Van Eaton, and it was for his percussion skills that he was hired by Hawkins in 1957, to play with his band, the Hawks.
Helm met singer-songwriter Libby Titus in April 1969, while the Band was recording its second album. They began a lengthy relationship which produced daughter Amy Helm, born December 3, 1970.
Helm met Sandra Dodd in 1975 in California, while he was still involved with Titus. Helm and Dodd were married on September 7, 1981. They had no children together.
Though an Arkansas native like Helm, Hawkins found steady success in Canada, and in the early 60’s Helm and Hawkins recruited a new batch of Canadian musicians who would later become the Band – the guitarist Robbie Robertson, the bass player Rick Danko, the pianist Richard Manuel and the organist Garth Hudson.
Tiring of Hawkins's dictatorial leadership, the group broke away in 1963 to become Levon and the Hawks. They recorded a couple of singles and made a living playing regular gigs in Canada and the US, but their career suddenly surged into overdrive when they were hired by Dylan as his backing band (by now called simply the Hawks) in 1965. But Dylan's move into amplified rock proved controversial, and Helm was so disturbed by the negative crowd reactions at some concerts that he quit and returned to Arkansas.
Dylan himself now retreated from the spotlight, and when he moved to the seclusion of upstate New York with the other Hawks, Helm rejoined them.
During 1967, the group recorded the fabled Basement Tapes with Dylan, before commencing work on their own first album. The musicians shared a pink-painted house in West Saugerties, New York, dubbed Big Pink, whence came the title of their 1968 debut, Music from Big Pink. They called themselves the Band since they were known casually as "the band" to friends and neighbours.
In 1969 they released The Band, often regarded as their pièce de résistance, for its masterly musicianship and songwriting, which seemed to reach back into the myths of American folklore and civil war history. The group's rustic, groaning harmonies lent huge emotional resonance to such pieces as The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, Rockin' Chair and King Harvest (Has Surely Come). Subsequent releases never recaptured the same magic, though Rock of Ages (1972) was an excellent live set and Northern Lights – Southern Cross (1975) was a belated return to something like peak form. In 1974 they recorded Planet Waves with Dylan before backing him on a wildly acclaimed American tour.
In 1976, the Band staged a grandiose farewell concert in San Francisco, the Last Waltz, to mark what many felt was a premature end to their performing career. Internal politics, not least friction between Helm and the increasingly dominant Robertson, had hastened the group's demise.
The concert featured a superstar guest list including Dylan, Clapton, Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and many more, and was memorialised as a triple LP and a film directed by Martin Scorsese.
In 1983 he reunited with Danko for an acoustic tour, and the following year Hudson and Manuel came on board for an acclaimed Band reunion, with only Robertson missing.
In 1998, Helm was diagnosed with throat cancer which caused him to lose his singing voice. After treatment, his cancer eventually went into remission, and he gradually regained the use of his voice. His 2007 comeback album Dirt Farmer earned the Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album in February 2008, and in November of that year, Rolling Stone magazine ranked him No. 91 in its list of 100 Greatest Singers of All Time. In 2010, Electric Dirt, his 2009 follow-up to Dirt Farmer, won the first Grammy Award for Best Americana Album, a category inaugurated in 2010. In 2011, his live album Ramble at the Ryman won the Grammy in the same category. In 2016, Rolling Stone magazine ranked him No. 22 in its list of 100 Greatest Drummers of All Time.
In April 2012, during the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremonies in Cleveland, Robbie Robertson sent "love and prayers" to Helm, fueling speculation about Helm's health. Helm had previously cancelled a number of performances, citing health issues or a slipped disk in his back; his final performances took place in Tarrytown, New York at Tarrytown Music Hall on March 24, and a final Midnight Ramble (with Los Lobos as the opening act) in Woodstock on March 31.
On April 17, 2012, Helm's wife Sandy and daughter Amy revealed that he had end-stage throat cancer. They posted the following message on Helm's website:
Dear Friends,
Levon is in the final stages of his battle with cancer. Please send your prayers and love to him as he makes his way through this part of his journey.
Thank you fans and music lovers who have made his life so filled with joy and celebration ... he has loved nothing more than to play, to fill the room up with music, lay down the back beat, and make the people dance! He did it every time he took the stage ...
We appreciate all the love and support and concern.
From his daughter Amy, and wife Sandy
Levon Helm, who helped to forge a deep-rooted American music as the drummer and singer for the Band, died on Thursday April 19, 2012 in Manhattan. He was 71 and lived in Woodstock, N.Y.
Fans were invited to a public wake at Helm's Barn studio complex on April 26. Approximately 2,000 fans came to pay their respects to the rock icon. The following day, after a private funeral service and a procession through the streets of Woodstock, Helm was interred in the Woodstock Cemetery, within sight of the grave of his longtime bandmaster
Levon Helm would have been 80 today.