Levon Helm Reclaimed His Place in the Band's Legacy With Just One Concert

Despite it all, his singing remained a wonder of ribald bewilderment, old-time religion and chaotic promise.

Ramble at the Ryman served as a powerful reminder that the late Levon Helm was more than a drummer. He was the Band’s sage old storyteller and its winking scamp.

The Band’s records were drawn from continuity, bringing in dizzyingly diverse, generational influences and performed in a chorus as if by brothers. That has always made a treasure hunt out of selecting any individual triumph.

Not here.

Peaking on the charts this month in 2011, Ramble at the Ryman was both a showcase and an important rejoinder: The Band’s principal songwriting credits may have gone to Robbie Robertson, but they were often completely inhabited by Helm’s carnal Arkansas drawl back then – and they were again on this stirring live release.

Helm was recording on Sept. 17, 2008, not long after his return from an initial brush with throat cancer. Even so, his singing remained a wonder of ribald bewilderment, old-time religion and chaotic promise.

This wasn’t, of course, Helm’s valedictory for the Band. Also included inside Ramble at the Ryman were a trio of tracks from his then-new Grammy-winning Dirt Farmer, among them “Wide River to Cross,” “Anna Lee” and “A Train Robbery.” Helm was appearing with a raucous group fronted by multi-instrumentalist Larry Campbell (who, like Helm, had connections back to Bob Dylan), which allowed him to stir in other material that matched both in tone and texture.

They were songs that helped form the foundation of the Band’s subsequent triumphs: “Back to Memphis,” the title track of a 1967 Chuck Berry release; “Fannie May,” the No. 1 1960 R&B hit for Buster Brown; “Baby Scratch My Back,” a No. 1 R&B hit for Slim Harpo in ’67; the Carter Family classic “No Depression in Heaven”; “Deep Elem Blues,” a 1920s-era traditional song later covered by Jerry Lee Lewis and the Grateful Dead; and Lefty Frizzell’s “Time Out for the Blues.”

Still, the highlights of the recording will always be Levon Helm’s rollicking new takes on signature tunes from his tenure in the Band with Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, Garth Hudson and, in their earliest and best-known incarnation, with Robertson. Helm opened this show with an almost anarchic “Ophelia,” originally from 1975’s Northern Lights-Southern Cross and now a shambling, horn-driven hoot.

Helm’s update of “Evangeline,” memorably performed with Emmylou Harris on 1978’s The Last Waltz, included a new guest turn by Sheryl Crow. She joined in a high lonesome vocal accompaniment with Helm. “Rag Mama Rag,” plucked from 1969’s The Band and always a great showcase for Helm’s deep South honk, has slowed by a half step, sounding slinkier and in no small way more dangerous.

Ramble at the Ryman also featured two songs closely associated with Helm’s former Band mates, beginning with keyboardist Brian Mitchell filling in at the mic during 1970’s “The Shape I’m In” for the late Richard Manuel. Later, on “Chest Fever” from the Band’s debut recording, Hudson’s iconic “Genetic Method” organ intro was smartly reimagined as a Larry Campbell guitar lick. (I'm not sure anyone could have approximated the heady mixture of demented soul that Hudson always brought to this track at the keyboard, anyway.)

Finally, there was the 1968 Band classic “The Weight,” featuring one of Helm’s most memorable shared vocals, this time with John Haitt taking over Danko’s aching asides. The rollicking arrangement, gospel-inflected and brassy, brilliantly echoed Allen Toussaint’s charts for the Band’s Rock of Ages.

By the end of Ramble at the Ryman, there was little question of Levon Helm’s importance, within his old group but also within the broader landscape of American roots music where he so often served both as an inventive interpreter and country proselytizer. His sermon, shouted before a jubilant crowd in Nashville that night: As long as these songs have been around, from the Band and from much further back, they will always provide us with a lasting communal joy.

You get the sense that our time with them – despite Helm’s later passing, despite these songs’ advancing age – is even now just beginning.

Amazon best-selling rock band biographer Nick DeRiso’s next book, ‘Forever Young: How the Band and Bob Dylan Made the Only ’60s Music That Still Matters,’ is set for release later in 2025. www.nickderiso.com.