Levon Helm

Mark Lavon "Levon" Helm (May 26, 1940 – April 19, 2012) was an American musician who achieved fame as the drummer and one of the three lead vocalists for the Band, for which he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994. Helm was known for his deeply soulful, country-accented voice, multi-instrumental ability, and creative drumming style, highlighted on many of the Band's recordings, such as "The Weight", "Up on Cripple Creek", and "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down".

Helm also had a successful career as a film actor, appearing as Loretta Lynn's father in Coal Miner's Daughter (1980), as Chuck Yeager's friend and colleague Captain Jack Ridley in The Right Stuff (1983), the father of Laura Dern's character in Smooth Talk (1985), as a Tennessee firearms expert in Shooter (2007), and as General John Bell Hood in In the Electric Mist (2009).

In 1998, Helm was diagnosed with throat cancer which caused him to lose his singing voice. After treatment, his cancer eventually went into remission, and he gradually regained the use of his voice. His 2007 comeback album Dirt Farmer earned the Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album in February 2008, and in November of that year, Rolling Stone magazine ranked him number 91 in its list of 100 Greatest Singers of All Time. In 2010, Electric Dirt, his 2009 follow-up to Dirt Farmer, won the first Grammy Award for Best Americana Album, a category inaugurated in 2010. In 2011, his live album Ramble at the Ryman won the Grammy in the same category. In 2016, Rolling Stone ranked him number 22 in its list of 100 Greatest Drummers of All Time.

Born Mark Lavon Helm in Elaine, Arkansas, his father's earliest immigrant ancestor to America was English colonist Israel Helm who arrived in what was then the Delaware Colony from Buckinghamshire, England in 1693. Helm grew up in Turkey Scratch, a hamlet of Marvell, Arkansas. His parents, Emma “Nell” and Jasper “Diamond” Helm, were cotton farmers who shared a strong affinity for music. They encouraged their children to play and sing at a young age. He saw Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys at the age of six and decided to become a musician. Helm began playing the guitar at the age of eight and also played drums.

Arkansas in the 1940s and '50s stood at the confluence of a variety of musical styles, including traditional Delta blues, electric blues, country (including old-time music), and the incipient genre of rhythm and blues (R&B). Helm was influenced by each of these styles, which he heard on the Grand Ole Opry on radio station WSM and R&B on radio station WLAC in Nashville. He also saw the last vestiges of minstrelsy and other traveling variety shows, such as F. S. Wolcott's Original Rabbit's Foot Minstrels, which featured top Black artists of the era.

A key early influence on Helm was Sonny Boy Williamson II, who played electric blues and early R&B on the King Biscuit Time radio show on KFFA in Helena and performed regularly in Marvell with blues guitarist Robert Lockwood, Jr. In his 1993 autobiography, This Wheel's on Fire: Levon Helm and the Story of the Band, Helm describes watching Williamson's drummer, James "Peck" Curtis, intently during a live performance in the early 1950s and later imitating this R&B drumming style. Helm established his first band, the Jungle Bush Beaters, while in high school.

Helm also witnessed some of the earliest performances by early rock and roll and rockabilly artists, including Elvis Presley, Conway Twitty, Bo Diddley, and fellow Arkansan Ronnie Hawkins. At age 17, Helm began playing in clubs and bars around Helena.

While he was still in high school, Helm was invited to join Ronnie Hawkins' band, the Hawks, a popular bar and club act in the South and Canada, where rockabilly acts were very successful. Helm's mother insisted that he graduate from high school before touring with Hawkins, but he was able to play with the Hawks locally on weekends. After his graduation in 1958, Helm joined the Hawks as a full-time member and they moved to Toronto, where they signed with Roulette Records in 1959 and released several singles, including a few hits.