Members / Levon Helm

Levon Helm

He was born Mark Lavon Helm on May 26, 1940, and grew up on a cotton farm in Turkey Scratch, Arkansas, a place so small it barely counts as a place. His bandmates in the Hawks kept mispronouncing "Lavon," and the mispronunciation stuck hard enough to become his actual name for the rest of his life. He was six when his father took him to see Bill Monroe and His Bluegrass Boys perform, and by his own account, that show rearranged something in his head permanently.

Helm was the only American in a band of Canadians, and he carried the weight of that distinction seriously. His Arkansas upbringing gave the group its credibility with blues, country, gospel, and rockabilly in a way the others, for all their skill, couldn't manufacture on their own. He married a Canadian divorcée named Connie Orr in late 1962, partly to secure Canadian citizenship and avoid the draft, a detail that says something about how seriously touring musicians in 1962 were thinking about Vietnam.

He was also the first to walk away from Bob Dylan's electric tour, quitting in November 1965 after barely a month of nightly boos, and he meant it: he went home to Arkansas and then out to the Gulf of Mexico to work an oil rig, genuinely done with music for a while. He came back in August 1967, in time for the basement sessions at Big Pink that would define the group's sound going forward.

After the Band's official breakup, Helm kept working constantly. His first solo record, Levon Helm & the RCO All-Stars (1977), brought in Paul Butterfield, Dr. John, and Steve Cropper. Two more self-titled albums followed with the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section behind him. He also acted, playing Loretta Lynn's father in Coal Miner's Daughter (1980) and test pilot Jack Ridley in The Right Stuff (1983), narrating the latter as well.

Diagnosed with throat cancer in the late 1990s, Helm chose twenty-seven rounds of radiation over a full laryngectomy, and lost his voice for a period before it slowly, partially returned, raspier than the tenor everyone remembered. He turned his barn and home studio in Woodstock into a recurring event called the Midnight Ramble, and built a genuine late-career comeback out of it: 2007's Dirt Farmer and 2009's Electric Dirt both won Grammy Awards. His 1993 memoir, This Wheel's on Fire, laid out his grievances against Robertson over songwriting credit and money in blunt, uncushioned terms, and the two men mostly avoided each other for decades afterward.

Helm's cancer returned in the spring of 2012 and spread through his spine. Robertson visited him in the hospital before the end. Helm died on April 19, 2012, at seventy-one. Arkansas later renamed a stretch of highway near his childhood home in his honor, and New York did the same with the road that runs to his Woodstock studio.