Levon Helm dead at 71: Drummer for The Band succumbs to cancer
You may have seen him in some unremarkable films, as he acted quite a bit in his post-Band years. I particularly enjoyed him in "The Right Stuff" as Chuck Yeager's bemused flight engineer, or in "Coal Miner's Daughter" as Loretta Lynn's father.
But he is primarily known for the work he did with The Band as drummer and vocalist, especially memorable when singing lead on “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”. There was something wonderfully American about his accent, as it seemed to contain traces of the disparate places of our country, from central Ohio down to the Delta.
The photo above is of the lamented Tony Mart's in Somers Point, New Jersey, where I misspent a fair portion of my youth. In the mid-1960's, the house band was Levon and The Hawks. They were noted for bringing Delta Blues from the cotton fields of Mississippi to a bunch of mostly white kids on the Jersey shore. One night, Bob Dylan stopped by, liked what he heard, and asked them to be his backup band. For the sake of irony, they were re-named The Band.
Here's a moment from their heyday: