LEVON HELM:A SHORTHAND way of describing Levon Helm, who has died of cancer aged 71, would be as the drummer with the Band, Bob Dylan's backing group, as he made the leap from folk to rock, which then forged a hugely influential career of its own in the late 1960s and 1970s.
This would have made Helm eminent enough, but his career stretched in many other directions, as drummer with the rock’n’roller Ronnie Hawkins, solo artist, prolific film actor and, most recently, host of the all-star Midnight Ramble Sessions.
He was an accomplished multi-instrumentalist and a fine and distinctive singer.
He was born Mark Lavon Helm in Elaine, Arkansas, the second of Nell and Diamond Helm’s four children. 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 became known, formed his own high-school rock ’n’roll band, the Jungle Bush Beaters, and at 17 he was invited to perform with Conway Twitty and his Rock Housers.
By now he had taken up the drums and it was for his percussion skills that he was hired by Hawkins in 1957 to play with his band, the Hawks.
In the early 1960s, the pair 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.
In his autobiography, This Wheel’s on Fire: Levon Helm and the Story of the Band (1993), Helm wrote that his new bandmates could not pronounce “Lavon” and called him Levon instead.
Tiring of Hawkins’s dictatorial leadership, the group broke away in 1963 to become Levon and the Hawks. Their career surged when they were hired by Dylan as his backing band (by now called simply the Hawks) in 1965.
In 1967, the group recorded the fabled Basement Tapes with Dylan before starting 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 piece de resistance, for its masterly musicianship and songwriting which seemed to reach back into American folklore and civil war history.
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 and was memorialised as a triple LP and a film directed by Martin Scorsese.
Helm wasted little time in launching a solo career. He made his film debut, playing the father of the country music star Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980).
In 1998, Helm was diagnosed with throat cancer. Although he lost his singing voice, he continued to perform (playing the drums, mandolin and harmonica) with his daughter Amy.
He fought back to performing fitness and, in 2004, inaugurated his Midnight Ramble Sessions, live performances at his Levon Helm Studios in Woodstock, New York.
In 2008, he was awarded a Recording Academy lifetime achievement award as well as an artist of the year award from the Americana Music Association. Electric Dirt (2009) brought another Grammy, for best Americana album, and Ramble at the Ryman (2011) earned a third.
His wife, Sandy, and daughter survive him.– (Guardian service)
Levon Helm (Mark Lavon Helm), musician, born May 26th, 1940; died April 19th, 2012 .