Robbie Robertson — Canadian Father of Americana | by Moviesl ivetrend

9 min readAug 12, 2023

Robbie Robertson — Canadian Father of Americana

The roots-rock guitarist and songwriter’s role in the evolution of the country-and-blues-infused genre spoke to his innate ambition and larger-than-life creative vision. Having grown up in Toronto, Canada, with his mother Dolly, whose indigenous roots connected them to the Six Nations Reserve southwest of the city, Robertson’s first exposure to music was on visits to the reserve, where he would regularly hear his relatives perform around sundown. This inspired him to eventually pick up the guitar at the age of 9. By the time Robertson had turned 13 in 1956, artists like Elvis Presley, Frankie Lymon, Fats Domino, and Carl Perkins dominated the charts — and the discovery of rock ’n’ roll in its brilliant, unfettered nascency was revolutionary for him. Despite his youth, the voices of his contemporaries quickly echoed through his own, and at just 16 he sold his ’58 Strat to buy a train ticket to Arkansas to audition for his hero, rockabilly bandleader Ronnie Hawkins.

Robbie Robertson, Leader of The Band, Dies at 80

Guitarist-songwriter-singer Robbie Robertson, who led the Canadian-American group the Band to rock prominence in the 1970s and worked extensively with Bob Dylan and Martin Scorsese, has died. He wa… “When the ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ idea was stirring around and it looked like it could happen,” Robertson said in the interview, “for Marty and me, every once in a while we would be like, ‘Isn’t this amazing, that it’s come to this, that we actually have a story and we have this thing that we’re both in our own way attached to somehow.’ Marty and I are both 80 years old, and we’re getting to do a Western, we’re getting to do a movie about Indians, in our own way.” (Robertson used the terms “Indian” and “Native” interchangeably, as he said his friends in the community did.) “There’s a particular enjoyment in that: ‘Let’s tackle this baby and try to do something magnificent.’ Whenever you’re going into a project, you want to shoot high and, and you want to do some really good work. But on something like this, where its soul is in Indian country — for me, you couldn’t have made something like this up.”

Robbie Robertson’s 10 Best Songs, With The Band & Solo

“The Weight,” “Up on Cripple Creek,” “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” plus more Robertson-penned favorites chosen by Billboard’s staff. With evocative, elliptical lines like “She’s been down in the dunes/ And she’s dealt with goons,” “Chest Fever” is a perfect slice of The Band’s rustic psychedelia — and, fittingly, in 1969, the group opened their Woodstock set with the Music From Big Pink track. Garth Hudson’s virtuosic organ, which leans heavily on Bach’s “Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor,” defines the track, but its relentless, driving instrumental is all Robertson. (Levon Helm would later dispute Robertson’s credit as sole lyric writer.) Not that any of this meant much to Robertson, who would later say, “If you like ‘Chest Fever,’ it’s for God knows what reason. … It doesn’t make particularly any kind of sense in the lyrics, in the music, in the arrangement, in anything.” — E.R.B.

Robbie Robertson remembered: Hamilton and beyond

Gary Lucas knew the legend as young guitarist striving to make The Hawks and later as The Band’s glue, writes Jeff Mahoney He gave popular music some of its most sharply drawn and endurably memorable glimpses of character and setting — from Bessie and the drunk recovering up on Cripple Creek, listening to Spike Jones on the radio, to Virgil and his wife surprised by an appearance up river of the steamboat Robert E. Lee, in the aftermath of the Civil War.

Robbie Robertson on ‘Dark Period’ of His Life and Rooming With Martin Scorsese

In our 1991 magazine feature, Robertson also shares stories from his days as Bob Dylan’s guitarist and reflects on his second solo album Storyville Already, on the record of “Who Do You Love” that you made with Ronnie Hawkins, your sound is recognizable. From that record to Storyville, I hear the same voice.Part of what I played [on “Who Do You Love”] developed out of this misunderstanding. When I first heard these records by Muddy Waters and Elmore James, in Canada, I didn’t know they were playing guitar with a slide, so I spent a lot of time studying how to do what they were doing with my fingers. The first time I saw somebody with a slide, I thought: “What’s that thing? That’s cheating!”What circuit did you guys play?It was Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, universities in states like Alabama and Mississippi, then a few places in New York and New Jersey, and then Detroit and into Canada. We played some shitholes for sure, some dangerous places, and there were nights when I’d just think it was amazing I was still alive. Ronnie was fearless; he almost tempted fate. That was scary in itself. But I was just so thrilled to be in that Cadillac, with that trailer with a hawk on the back, that I thought it was worth dying for.Did you continue to write songs for Hawkins?I was writing all along, but writing songs somehow became an insignificant part of this life on the road. Ronnie got to this place where the records weren’t as important anymore as the jobs were. Really, we were in a survival situation, just making a living from week to week. And we never talked about it, but Ronnie started kind of settling in. His thing was, okay, maybe it’s time to start becoming a more mature human being. I don’t know whether that’s happened yet, but it was crossing his mind. We were younger and still had this fire that we had to deal with. This is one of the big reasons we finally left Ronnie: Our curiosity factor was still out of control. We were at another crossroads.

“Playing with Bob Dylan was like entering The Twilight Zone of music. You thought, ‘They’re going to wake me up tomorrow because all of this is impossible’”: Robbie Robertson reflects on his remarkable career and the end of the Band

In his final Guitar World interview, the late guitar legend shared his earliest guitar influences, what it was like to get booed onstage with Dylan and why the Band’s final days were so heartbreaking Alan Paul is the author of three books, Texas Flood: The Inside Story of Stevie Ray Vaughan, One Way Way Out: The Inside Story of the Allman Brothers Band — which were both New York Times bestsellers — and Big in China: My Unlikely Adventures Raising a Family, Playing the Blues and Becoming a Star in Beijing, a memoir about raising a family in Beijing and forming a Chinese blues band that toured the nation. He’s been associated with Guitar World for 30 years, serving as Managing Editor from 1991–96. He plays in two bands: Big in China and Friends of the Brothers, with Guitar World’s Andy Aledort.

Robbie Robertson Interviewed: “I remember saying to Dylan, there’s too many verses in this”

In remembrance of Robbie Robertson, who has passed away aged 80, MOJO revisits our 2017 interview with The Band’s guitarist and songwriter. There was never one discussion between the guys in the band about me not writing the songs. That would have been preposterous. I worked my ass off and they knew what I did and came to me and apologised for not holding up their end in that area. [Levon] made statements years after The Band that were just blatantly unfounded, and he’d never said one word to me about that in all of our times together. I chose to not say anything ’cos I knew that he was suffering from something and I didn’t want to turn this into anything. It broke my heart, but I knew it was untruthful, and of every song that I ever wrote for The Band, I wrote and brought to them, I never brought a song to them and said, “Can you help me finish this.” I finished some of their songs, but never once did [the opposite] happen. And he played a lesser part in the songwriting than anybody because, as we said earlier, it wasn’t his thing, it didn’t come naturally to him. So, he wrote Strawberry Wine and I helped him finish it, and I gave him credit on Life Is A Carnival and Jemima Surrender ’cos he was there, I loved him and I wanted to give him credit.

The Last Waltz: the coke-fuelled saga behind the greatest concert film ever made

An all-star cast and an A-list director made The Band’s final gig a night to remember. But Neil Young, for one, enjoyed it more than others A more significant issue was the shabby venue. “Winterland had been an ice-skating rink and was looking pretty funky,” Robertson remembered. “Bill Graham was concerned about the appearance of the façade of the upper balcony and thought he would need $5,000 out of the budget to fix it. [Cameraman] Michael Chapman and Steve Prince, Marty’s assistant, noted that the floor had “give” to it. With the audience moving around and dancing, this would make the cameras unsteady. Michael said, “It’s going to take some construction.”

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“I said, ‘Well, it’ll just be a back-up song in case some other things don’t work out’” — How Robbie Robertson wrote The Band’s classic song, The Weight

“I sat the guitar on my lap and I was kind of bent over it and I looked inside the sound hole on the guitar and it said, Nazareth, Pennsylvania” The Weight wasn’t given a definitive arrangement until The Band were holed up in New York’s A&R studio with producer John Simon in January 1968. One of the song’s standout sections is the staggered vocal harmony that follows the chorus and, incredibly, it was almost an afterthought. “We didn’t really get it that organised until we recorded it,” said Robertson. “And it came pretty simply. There was something about it that was so natural that it didn’t take a lot of organising… And then this thing at the end of the chorus where the voices stagger for that last line? It was a thing that came to me, like, in the last minute of working on the song. A lot of people say those spontaneous things are the best things and, well, this is one of those cases where that was very true!”

Bob Dylan Pays Tribute to Former Bandmate Robbie Robertson

Robertson was key to Dylan’s pivotal late 1960s sound, and the musicians maintained their friendship for decades © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. Pitchfork may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Ad Choices

How ‘The Last Waltz’ Became One of Rock’s Greatest Docs

The film capturing the Band’s final performance in 1976 is a showcase for the group’s main songwriter and guitarist, Robbie Robertson. And for some, that was a problem. “The Last Waltz” — which put a spotlight on the Band’s guitarist and principal songwriter, Robbie Robertson, who died this week at 80 — was a confident, dramatic upgrade with an atypical structure. It begins with the concert’s final song, and incorporates band interviews and B-roll shots to give personality to each member. The 1978 film employs highly stylized backlighting and footlights, avoids audience shots and uses nearly every camera angle except low angle front, which is how bands are traditionally seen by members of an audience. The musicians dressed like western gunslingers ready to face their end, and to counteract all the mythic imagery, the interviews are full of the kind of artifice other films edit out, including awkward exchanges between the band members and Scorsese, their stumbling inquisitor. The movie dwells in shades of purple, the color of bruises and cabernet sauvignon.

Robbie Robertson: Remembering the famed storyteller and his roots in Six Nations, Ont.

Robbie Robertson died Aug. 9 at the age of 80. He had a huge impact on musicians of Six Nations, Ont., a community where he was embraced and celebrated — and six years ago, became an enrolled member. Candace Maracle is Wolf Clan from Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory. She has a master’s degree in journalism from Toronto Metropolitan University. She is a laureate of The Hnatyshyn Foundation REVEAL Indigenous Art Award. Her latest film, a micro short, Lyed Corn with Ash (Wa’kenenhstóhare’) is completely in the Kanien’kéha language.

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