As a songwriter, guitarist and vocalist in The Band, Robbie Robertson innovated a meld of folk, country and rock music that's now labeled Americana. Robertson died on Wednesday (Aug. 9) in Los Angeles at age 80.
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Born July 5, 1943 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and raised on the Six Nations Reserve, Robertson first met future members of The Band while they were all in rockabilly artist Ronnie Hawkins' backing band, The Hawks. Robertson and the rest of The Band —Rick Danko, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel and Levon Helm— more famously backed Bob Dylan on his first electric tour.
The Band's debut album Music From Big Pink (1968) included "The Weight," a sprawling Southern literary epic set to music. The same fascination with —and mastery of— regional music traditions informed the equally crucial 1969 double A-side "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" and "Up on Cripple Creek."
"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," Robertson said on PBS' 1996 documentary Shakespeares in the Alley.
The group's original run culminated in a final concert on Nov. 25, 1976 at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco. The star-studded event became Martin Scorsese's 1978 film The Last Waltz. That connection positioned Robertson to contribute to the soundtracks of several Scorsese films, most notably Raging Bull (1980) and The Wolf of Wall Street (2013).
Robertson collaborated with numerous rock icons, appearing on multiple Ringo Starr albums and co-writing with Eric Clapton the latter's 1987 hit "It's in the Way That You Use It."
Less than six months before his death, Robertson wed Janet Zuccarini, the founder and CEO of Gusto 54 Restaurant Group and a Top Chef Canada judge. He previously married the mother of his three children, Canadian journalist Dominique Bourgeois, in 1968.
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