[Update 4/19/2012 – On his website, the family of Levon Helm has announced, “Levon Helm passed peacefully this afternoon. He was surrounded by family, friends and band mates and will be remembered by all he touched as a brilliant musician and a beautiful soul.” The material below was posted earlier in the week, prior to Helm’s passing.]
So much has been said about white musicians borrowing from black musicians in the South, and there’s a lot to it, but the life and story of Levon, like the history of his country, is a lot more complicated than that. As long as he breathes Levon is a living legend. He’s in that special class of Rock & Roll era artists we call The Innovators. He’s right up there with Hendrix, Chuck Berry, Ike Turner – all three Kings. He was part of the whole story – from before the moment they split the atom in Memphis and sent shock waves across the countryside, to the carpet bag industry the Yankees came and pimped upon it, through the many rise and falls and rebirths; until the very epicenter of Rock & Roll, like the Roman Empire receding into the gates of the Vatican, became concentrated on Saturday nights in an old man named Levon’s Barn.
Levon Helm, one of the kings of Country-Funk, a folk library of rhythms and shakes that are forever lost in the digi-march of a million beat machines, one of the great song interpreters in America has ever known, on cuts like ‘The Night They Drove Ol’ Dixie Down’ and more recently on his brilliant reading of ‘King Fish’, will soon be dead. No man ever quite played drums and sang like he could. No one sang the story of the fall of Confederacy in such a way that could take Jessie Jackson’s breath away. No Cracker I ever heard sang with SO MUCH SOUL, without an ounce of detachment from man the he born and always meant to be. In a band of brilliant Canadians, he was the genuine article: A boy from Arkansas that grew up to become a King of The Blues.
Hear him sing 3 years ago on King Fish, after they told him he’d never sing again:
There’s a hundred-thousand Frenchmen in New Orleans
In New Orleans there are Frenchmen everywhere
But your house could fall down
Your baby could drown
Wouldn’t none of those Frenchmen care
Everybody gather ’round
Loosen up your suspenders
Hunker down on the ground
I’m a cracker
And you are too
But don’t I take good care of you
– Davin Michael Stedman
