Levon Helm | 1940-2012: Singer, drummer gave Band special twang

ALBANY, N.Y. — With songs like The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, The Weight and Up on Cripple Creek, the Band fused rock, blues, folk and gospel to create a sound that seemed as authentically American as a Mathew Brady photograph or a Mark Twain short story.

In truth, the group had only one American — Levon Helm, who died yesterday at age 71 of complications from cancer, said Lucy Sabini of Vanguard Records.

Helm, a drummer and singer, brought an urgent beat and a genuine Arkansas twang to some of the Band’s best-known songs and helped turn a bunch of musicians known mostly as Bob Dylan’s backup group into one of rock’s most-legendary acts.

Helm and his bandmates — Canadians Rick Danko, Garth Hudson, Robbie Robertson and Richard Manuel — were musical virtuosos who returned to the roots of American music in the late 1960s as other rockers veered into psychedelia, heavy metal and jams. The group’s 1968 debut, Music From Big Pink, and its follow-up, The Band, remain landmark albums of the era.

Early on, the Band backed Dylan on his sensational and controversial electric tours of 1965-66 and collaborated with him on the legendary Basement Tapes.

The son of an Arkansas cotton farmer, Helm was just out of high school when he joined rocker Ronnie Hawkins for a tour of Canada in 1957 as drummer for the Hawks. That band recruited a group of Canadians who spent grueling years touring rough bars in Canada and the South.

They would split from Hawkins, hook up with Dylan and eventually call themselves the Band — because, as they said, that’s what everyone called them anyway.

Original members of the Band were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.

Since 2007, Helm won three Grammys for his solo work. He also acted in some movies, most notably as Loretta Lynn’s father in Coal Miner’s Daughter.

Helm learned he had throat cancer in 1998. On Tuesday, his website said he was in the final stages of cancer. He died at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.