Robbie Robertson, Guitarist and Songwriter With the Band, Dies at 80

Robbie Robertson, the chief composer and lead guitarist for the Band, whose work provided a country imaginative and prescient of America that appeared directly mythic and genuine, within the course of serving to to encourage the style that got here to be referred to as Americana, died on Wednesday in Los Angeles. He was 80.

His supervisor, Jared Levine, stated he died after an extended sickness.

The songs Mr. Robertson wrote for the Band used enigmatic lyrics to evoke a tough and colourful America of yore. With unusual conviction, they conjured a wild place, typically centered within the South, peopled by rough-hewed characters, from the defeated Confederate soldier in “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” to the powerful union employee of “King Harvest Has Surely Come” to the shady creatures in “Life Is a Carnival.”

The music he matched to his passionate yarns mined the roots of each important American style, together with folks, nation, blues and gospel. Yet when his history-minded compositions first appeared on albums by the Band within the late Sixties, they felt important in addition to classic.

“I wanted to write music that felt like it could’ve been written 50 years ago, tomorrow, yesterday — that had this lost-in-time quality,” Mr. Robertson stated in a 1995 interview for the general public tv collection “Shakespeare in the Alley.”

Speaking of the Band within the 2020 documentary “Once Were Brothers,” Bruce Springsteen stated, “It’s like you’d never heard them before and like they’d always been there.”

In its day, the Band’s music additionally stood out by inverting the rising quantity and mania of psychedelic rock, and in addition by sidestepping its accent on youthful rebel. “We just went completely left when everyone else went right,” Mr. Robertson stated.

The ripple impact of that sound and picture — first unveiled on the Band’s first album, “Music From Big Pink,” launched in 1968 — went broad on influence, touchdown the group on the quilt of Time journal in 1970 and provoking a bunch of main artists to create their very own homespun amalgams, from the Grateful Dead’s album, “Workingman’s Dead” (1970) to Elton John’s “Tumbleweed Connection,” launched the following 12 months. The Band’s music so affected Mr. Robertson’s fellow guitarist Eric Clapton that he lobbied for entry into their ranks. (The provide was politely declined.) 1 / 4-century later, the Band’s music offered a key template for the acts first labeled Americana, together with Son Volt, Wilco and Lucinda Williams, in addition to for his or her sonic heirs.

An entire obituary will seem shortly.