Levon Helm

As a founding member of the Band and one of the most celebrated rock drummers of the past 50 years, Levon Helm embodied two sets of folk memories in his music. One was of the pop culture of the 1960s. The other was of an older, lost America of dirt farmers, train robbers and Civil War veterans scratching out the foundations of the Republic.

Helm died April 19, at age 71, from the cancer that he had been fighting for more than a decade. A few years ago he began getting a knockout band together on Saturday nights in the barn cum recording studio at his house in Woodstock, N.Y. And if you were one of the lucky ones who caught a Midnight Ramble, good for you. If you never did, my deepest sympathy. What made the evenings memorable was not just the music. It was the happiness. A whole new audience was finding a voice that managed to be sorrowful one moment, fun the next, rolling through clever takes on Band classics, old ballads and new songs about events long ago. The group that Levon put together for the Rambles produced three Grammy-winning albums. You should buy them all.