Well, as I watched the Super Bowl last night, my email pinged, and I saw a reply to a submission I made a few weeks back. These usually begin with “Thank you for submitting, blah, blah, your work was not selected for inclusion.”

This one?

It began with “Congratulations!” I love that kind of start.

The good people at Blood+Honey took five poems. Usually, you hope for a couple, but they took all five. For a writer, that is a huge win.

I will be in touch with updates. I hope you enjoy these when they come out.

Till next time!

Dan

During my time there, I grew to love the state and the people. They are hearty, plainspoken folks who love a beer and a good time. I’ve made some great friends from there: professors, work colleagues, and fellow writers. What is going on there is beyond disgusting. As a nation, we should not settle for what our government is perpetrating on its citizens.

If the goal is to arrest the worst of the worst, why are everyday people dying? If the goal is to eradicate crime, wouldn’t a sneak-up quietly approach work best? These are some of the many questions I am asking myself, and you should ask too. We are better than this. And we should stand up and say it.

The events over the weekend moved me to write this and the following poem. I honestly don’t care if you think it is good poetically. Poetry should be honest, and damn it, this is how I feel!

Death Over Breakfast

I saw a man fall at the
the donut shop.
It was winter, and ice was all around.

And I was helpless and afraid and angry and betrayed
and lost for words whose meanings don’t count.

Where are the ones who will save us?
Where are the heroes who once stood tall
in the face of tyranny, and fought for the rights
of people, no matter how small?

Will somebody please board a ship
and toss all the tea in the sea?
Will someone please light a fire
that will burn like a beacon for liberty?

What will it take to strike the flint
in the minds of those who find humor in the pain of the weak?

There’s blood on the street and tracked through the snow
while blue lights pulse through the window.

I’m going to send a poem your way every now and then and hope you get some fun from them. I think poetry should speak in a language that pulls you in and tells you things in a way you can understand and connect with. That’s my goal with what I’m doing. I’m attaching some here, and I hope you enjoy them going forward.

Fiddleheads

There’s a feeling that comes

On the holiest days

A fear of failing

In so many ways.

“It’ll be fine,”

Everyone says

Like an old record

Stuck, the same song plays

Unlimited possibilities in

Limited space

I’ll never leave you –

Always lurking in the dark

Where ghosts always are

Have you ever noticed the beauty

Of a fiddlehead

Carved intricately like

An antique bedstead

Or the corner of a casket

For the sleeping dead

There’s sharp turns on the

Road ahead

I’d rather be somewhere,

Anywhere instead

Look for the silver

Linings that delineate

The borders of clouds

No matter what

Morning always comes

Too quick, too bright

Too happy for some

They never quite can

Get off plumb

Always marching to

modernity’s drum

Ratta tat tat

Boom, boom, boom

Never, never, say

The words you really want to–

They cut like a knife.

Juglines

You gotta have a three-way swivel

And some heavy fishing line.

Dog food’s good,

But hot dogs will do.

Liter or gallon jugs don’t matter,

They just gotta float.

You need a brick

And a cinder block

To hold everything

Down

Where the dreams of boys and men

Hide in the darkness

Waiting on their prey.

Panhandlers

The panhandlers have come South for winter,
sitting like natives on the corners,
by traffic lights, outside the shops that sell
the things they long to hold.

I saw Lori last week leaving the theatre.
She’d watched something foreign, French I think.
I don’t speak that language, or hers;
I’m illiterate to what she loves.

Donnie stays open late on Saturdays,
selling sins until nearly dawn.
Menthols cool my lungs, and whiskey tries
like hell to warm me.

A woman sits on a stool across the bar,
looking at me like a meal.
She traces the rim of her glass,
smiling like a priest.

There was a time I’d lift my drink—
an invitation to talk.
But the years have taken the want of it.
So like the beggars, I avert my eyes.

Long time, no write. I just wanted to let you all know that since my last update, I now have two books out in the world. It has been a whirlwind promoting them and visiting with so many lovely folks who have read them.

If you would like a copy, there are two ways to get one. You can always order from Amazon, but it would mean the world to me if you ordered through Dog Ear Books in Russellville, AR. Pat is wonderful, and she can hook you up with a copy of Lies We Choose to Believe or Poor Birds. Here is the link to the store: https://ilovedogear.com/browse/filter/t/dan%20russell/k/keyword

I would love that, and Pat would, too.

In other news, I am now on the faculty at Concordia-St. Paul, my alma mater, in the MFA program. Exciting times.

Book three is halfway finished, and I think it will be out in the world this spring. More to come on that front.

Glad to catch up. If you are in Arkansas on September 27, come see me at The Blytheville Book Company. I will be there signing books from 9 AM to 1 PM. There will be music, food, and a great lineup of writers on hand.

See you then!

Keep chopping.

Shel is a stud of a writer and what he has going at Poverty House is a lot of fun. I am mostly posting short stories and music reviews over there. There is tons of stuff to read from some very talented folks. You should stop by and have a look.

Also, I am hoping the new year brings a new book. Everyone on here has followed the journey with my first book, but the second is about to wrap up, and I will hopefully get to work on the third in the next few months.

So, this was just an update. Head over to Poverty House and see what is going on. I promise you won’t be disappointed.

I am pretty proud of this one. A funny little aside related to the story, I developed the whole thing, start to finish, in church. I jotted down a short outline on a visitor card and wrote the story the following Monday. The end result is a mix of Ron Rash and Larry Brown. I want to give a big nod to Ron, who I got to talk to about this story before I submitted it. I told him his story, “Ascent,” was a huge influence on it. He has a new book out, The Caretaker. If you are into great Southern writing, pick it up. Ron is a master of his craft and a very generous and kind man.

Give Red Sky Morning a read here: https://deadmule.com/dan-russell-red-sky-morning/

Last week I was talking to the good lady wife and mentioned that I was beginning to think that social media was the new Tower of Babel. moment for society.

You know what happened?

I saw an article today that made the same argument.

The proliferation of social media in our society has led to us not being able to speak to one another in a way that is conducive to civil discourse.

Therefore, I am going to go dark on my socials.

In the near future, I am dropping a book. I won’t be promoting it on there, I will send a note like this through here.

I am proud of it. I think it is good work.

I hope you will, too.

https://www.close2thebone.co.uk/wp/yellow-old-timer-2/

You can read it and the other wonderful writers included in the issue on their site by following the link.

“It Sounds Like We All Got Religion Don’t It?”

How Levon Helm and The Band Brought the Music of the Arkansas Delta to the World

by Danny Aaron Russell

My family are musicians. Of my grandfather’s nine siblings, all are musically talented. During their youth they formed a band and traveled the Delta playing shows under the name the Flexibles. They never hit it big, but they lived their dream. I came to music in my teens and found that I also had the gift. I have played music in some form or fashion for over twenty-five years. I have collaborated with my cousins many times and found we share the same passion our fathers and grandfathers shared during their youth. Throughout the year, my family gather to celebrate birthdays and holidays and music is always at the forefront. It was at one of these reunions that I noticed something peculiar that I had not before: While we could all play and sing very well, there was a sound coming from my relatives’ instruments I could not recreate. There was a fundamental characteristic within their playing that I could not reproduce. It had an almost ethereal quality, a tone of its own that sounded more robust. At first, I put it down to strings, pick-ups, or type of amplifier. But, when I upgraded to the same or equal quality gear, I found I still could not produce that sound.

There is a school of thought that one’s fingers are integral in creating the tone of an instrument, and that the body is a channel for someone’s individual sound. While I could play all the chords, I could never recreate the tone my rel- atives produced. I was puzzled. Why could I not sound like them? Why was my tone so different from theirs? Were we all not taught in the same way by the same people? These questions perplexed me for some time. Until one day I had a musical epiphany that made perfect sense when I stopped to examine the real reason for my dilemma.

My grandfather’s family grew up on a small farm outside of Tilton, Arkansas, sixty-six miles due west of Memphis, Tennessee, and seventy- five miles north of Helena, Arkansas. After high school, my grandfather moved to Weiner, Arkansas, while the remainder of his siblings settled in Woodruff and southern Cross counties. My cousins lived within a stone’s throw of the old home place and remained immersed in delta culture. My cousin Eric played in blues bands across eastern Arkansas while his brother, Greg, picked up the harmonica from an African-American man named JR and jammed with him on his front porch every chance he could. Their family were Pentecostal, and their church stressed the importance of music in the service.

I was born in Northeast Arkansas and raised outside of Jonesboro, Delta by definition but not at heart. The music on the radio was rock, pop, or gospel. On weekends, I would watch Hee Haw with my grandfather and on Sunday sing in the church choir accompanied only by piano because other instruments were sacrilegious. This was my musical upbringing. My grandfather loved music and had a cherry red Gibson bass I thought was some sort of musical grail. I badly wanted to play and at fourteen picked up a guitar and learned my first chords. The first songs I learned were “Silent Night” and “Proud Mary.” The influence of my surroundings was apparent.

What I soon discovered was that I was too far from the source of the sound I longed to recreate. I was born near the Delta. My cousins were of the Delta. I spent my time listening to delta blues and rock and roll, while they were actively participating in it. I was singing gospel music, but they were making it. What I was trying to recreate, they were creating. My experience of learning music was in direct contrast to their making it.

The Arkansas Delta, an area haunted by memories wrought with pain and suffering, this land filled with countless tales of endurance, this region baptized with blood and saved by grace, holds something within that consumes its residents and attaches itself in a way they may wish to forget but, too often, find too powerful to shake. This influence, this attachment, the soul of the area, makes it unique and inspiring. It gives life to American culture and words to songs that celebrate it.

The Delta has given the music world countless performers and musicians. Harold Jenkins, better known as Conway Twitty, Sonny Boy Williamson, Charlie Rich, and a drummer, intent to play the music of his heroes, who created some of the most celebrated American music ever put to tape, Levon Helm. While Helm was not the leader of the Canadian-American roots rock collective known as The Band, he was its heart and

soul. His is the voice that echoes on their best-loved hits like “Up On Cripple Creek,” “Ophelia,” “The Weight,” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” the latter made all the more powerful due to Helm’s southern delivery and conviction.

Helm’s understanding of hard times and suffering experienced during his childhood in Turkey Scratch, near Marvell, lent him the distinct perspective through which to portray that experience in music. Helm used these influences to become one of the most respected rock ’n’ roll drummers and singers among modern musicians. His distinct vocals and unmistakable rhythm formed the backbone of The Band.

The Band’s music is inherently Americana in its essence and only Helm, with his under- standing of the roots of American music, gave the group’s songs the proper nuance to feel genuine. By exploring how the distinct properties of the Delta: religion, secular music, historical import, and race—influenced Helm and his bandmates, this essay will explicate Delta music’s context and scholarship. It is the region’s gift to the world and is responsible for the soul that lies at the heart of its sound.

Mark Lavon “Levon” Helm was born May 26, 1940, in Marvell, Arkansas, to Nell and Diamond Helm, tenant farmers in the small nearby town of Turkey Scratch. The family grew cotton and Levon grew up understanding the toil of southern agriculture firsthand (Rogers 2019). Much like my family, the Helms sweated through the summers tending and picking cotton which brought little reward for maximum effort. At the age of seven, Helm began helping in the fields by delivering water to his family, and other workers, black, white, and Latino who shoved cotton into large sacks (Helm and Davis 1993, 13).

In his autobiography, This Wheel’s on Fire: Levon Helm and the Story of The Band, co-authored with Stephen Davis, Helm describes the beauty and starkness of his Delta home: “Think of endless cotton fields, gravel roads, groves of pecan trees, canebrakes, bayous, pump houses, kudzu vines, sharecropper’s cabins, tenant farmhouses, flooded rice fields, the biggest sky in the world, and the nearby Mississippi, like an inland sea with its own weather system. Think 110 degrees in the shade in the summertime. Cotton country” (1993, 15).

This land, in its liminal state of wet and dry is home to some of the nation’s richest soil. Rice, soybeans, and cotton still dominate the landscape as they did during Helm’s youth (Helm and Davis 1993, 14). Those who have labored under the weight a cotton sack never forget the burden or the heat of the days when every ounce of effort was employed to harvest cotton from the fields. Cotton was the main export for the region, a troublesome crop, tainted with prejudice, inequality, racism, and violence.

Not far from the Helm farm was Elaine, Arkansas, the site of one of the nation’s bloodiest race-related incidents. What became known as the Elaine Massacre stemmed from the efforts of local black sharecroppers to organize for better pay and working conditions. What resulted was wholesale murder and untold casualties in the name of continued white supremacy (see Stock- ley 2004; Whitaker 2009).1 Helm recalls his father was farming near Elaine in 1919 when what he remembers as the “Elaine race riots” broke out (Helm and Davis 1993, 15). His recollection of the events is tainted with time but important to understanding how locals viewed an event that is still troublesome for area residents. “Some black tenant sharecroppers around Elaine,” Helm recalled, “couldn’t live on low crop prices that amounted to peonage, so they started a union and withheld their cotton from the market. A bunch of Ku Kluxers from around Helena drove over and shot up one of their meetings. Things took off from there, and quite a few people from both races were killed before federal troops from Little Rock, Arkansas, put a stop to it” (15).

Helm’s account differs slightly from the accepted version of events, but his recollection of the reaction of local whites is telling. “Someone put out a rumor that all the white farmers and their families were going to be murdered by the rioters. My daddy remembered waiting with his father and brother on the front porch of their farm, pistols, and shotguns at the ready. ‘If they show up here,’ my grandfather told his sons, ‘don’t shoot until I say so, we’ll fight ’em as long as we live.’ But the riot never did come down the road that day” (Helm and Davis 1993, 15).

The riot never “came down the road” because there was no riot of which to speak. What occurred was murder by local whites in order to suppress black labor and to maintain a system of patronage and white supremacy. While Helm’s account is secondhand and no doubt encumbered by years of re-telling and whitewashing, it does show the fear whites in the region had in regard to African Americans and their push for progress.2

Levon’s mother, Nell, gave him a different outlook on race and equality than that of his father’s family. Her family were more progressive and rooted in biblical teachings about equality and kindness. Her ability to relay this to her son saved him from what C. Van Woodward labeled “The burden of southern history.”3 In speaking of his mother, Levon is appreciative of her efforts. “It saved me from having to wear that whole damn load of racism that a lot of people had to carry. My mom, God love her, she was one of those Bible people. She thought it was wrong to bother anybody, regardless of race, color, or religion. It just wasn’t a Christian thing to look down on anybody, and that’s what she taught us” (Helm and Davis 1993, 17). This unburdening from the yoke of racism would prove pivotal for Levon as he grew older. The intermingling of black and white, secular and religious, and right and wrong would play a large role in his life, no more so than when he first discovered his love of music.

Levon’s musicality was instilled by his family. Like many other southern families, the Helms gathered around the radio at night and listened to and sang along with the Grand Ole Opry (Helm and Davis 1993, 19). Along with the radio, the Helms would go into town and watch traveling musicians play into the wee hours. It was at one of these shows in Marvell, Arkansas, that young Levon had his “brain tattooed” by the music of Bill Monroe and His Bluegrass Boys (19- 20). No doubt the rhythmic pounding of the mandolin and stand-up bass left an impression on a young boy already singing “Sitting on Top of the World” with his father and listening to Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky” on the family radio (19). Levon recalled that hearing Bill Monroe live “was the end of cowboys and Indians for me” (20). From that point forward, his destiny was inextricably linked to a career in music and entertainment.

Long known for its fertile soil, the Mississippi Delta also produced an ever-growing crop of musicians. Blues music is so prolific in the area that a sub-genre, delta blues, takes its name from the region. Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, Son House, and Charley Patton became famous playing this distinctive style of blues. Delta blues has a particular sound. It is rustic, raw, and honest. There are no accoutrements, only a singer, the occasional harmonica, and an acoustic guitar, plucked by bare fingers and its neck caressed with Coricidin bottles or hollowed out bones.4 Delta bluesmen howled about hellhounds and mojo bones.5 The atmosphere surrounding Levon Helm was full of musical inspiration and influence.

For a young man so enthralled by music, the Arkansas Delta offered many avenues through which one could indulge this enchantment. The blues that wafted across the Mississippi River began to play in clubs around Helena and West Memphis. Blues music gave voice to the plight of African Americans and was a platform where things that could not be said in mixed company could be sung about over the top of moaning acoustic guitars. Juke joints—private, often integrated, rural dancehalls—provided an outlet for African Americans and particularly African American women to let loose and free themselves from the oppression of the Jim Crow era and the restraint placed on their bodies by its racial conventions (see Hunter 1998).6 The area around Helena offered such adventures, and soon, young Levon would experience them firsthand.

When the clock strikes noon in Helena, tradition rings out from radio speakers across the region. King Biscuit Time, the nation’s longest running daily music program, fills the airwaves with the sound of blues music. The Peabody Award winning program, hosted for years by the late Sonny Payne, has influenced countless musicians across the world. According to the “King Biscuit Time Info” page of the Delta Cultural Center website, in its heyday, the show featured Sonny Boy Williamson and Robert Lockwood, Jr. Together they brought blues into the homes of blacks and whites throughout the Delta. The Helms were no different; young Levon loved music on King Biscuit Time and soon made the trek into Helena and down Cherry Street to the studio at KFFA to watch recordings of the program in person (Helm and Davis 1993, 26).

The influence of the blues and bluegrass had a deep effect on Helm. As he grew older he took up the drums and mandolin, the former becoming his primary instrument after watching James “Peck” Curtis provide the backbeat for Williamson and Lockwood, but the latter always promi- nent on later recordings (Helm and Davis 1993, 26). Marrying traditional elements of American music like the blues, bluegrass, and country would come to define the music later produced by The Band, and far from the Delta, another young man was finding his own way with music.

Robbie Robertson was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, on July 5, 1943. According to his “Bio” page on Robbie-Robertson.com (2019), Robertson also quickly took to music and at a young age began to play in bands around the Toronto area. His musical talents were matched by his ability to write songs his band and other artists wanted to perform. One of these was a rockabilly pioneer from Northwest Arkansas named Ronnie Hawkins. Hawkins was gregarious, rambunctious, and at heart, a determined entrepreneur. He had heard from Harold Jenkins (who would later gain fame as Conway Twitty) that the scene for rockabilly in Canada was growing and people were “starving for a good band up there.” Convinced he, too, could make an impact up North, Hawkins recruited local musicians, mainly from the Arkansas Delta, to join his band. One of these musicians was a young drummer from Turkey Scratch, Arkansas, named Levon Helm.

Robertson had written two songs, “Hey Boba Lu,” and, “Someone Like You,” that interested Hawkins. After meeting the young Canadian and performing his songs, Hawkins invited Robertson to join his band, The Hawks. The group tore up the local scene in Toronto. Enthusiastic fans of rockabilly music came night in and night out to hear them play blues standards and original compositions. After a few years with Hawkins, the core members of the group broke off to form their own band, The Canadian Squires, Robertson’s “Bio” page notes. This iteration of the Hawks (or Canadian Squires)—Robbie Robert- son, Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, and Garth Hudson—would become the foundation for a new group simply called The Band.

Through their work with Hawkins, members of the band were exposed to Arkansas and to the music of the Delta. They were deeply influenced by the blues, gospel, country, and rockabilly music emanating out of the region. They could not get enough. The members immersed themselves in learning what they could about the sounds of the Delta and how to incorporate that type of honesty and feeling into their own songs.

Only recently has the genre of Americana music become a style of music all its own. Its focus on traditional elements harkens back to a simpler time. Music such as this, focusing on traditional acoustic instrumentation and vocals, was not a recognized genre in the early 1960s. The primary outlet for country-tinged bands was through folk or country-rock music. Bands like Buffalo Springfield and The Byrds, especially during the membership of Graham Parsons, brought a jangle and rurality to rock music.8 This laid-back style created a new sound. A sound that introduced listeners to more traditional elements in modern popular music. The Band would seize on this trend and use the influence of the music of the American South to create something new that sounded like it came from another era.

The Mississippi Delta is a unique place on the American landscape and in the American mind. It is constantly under tremendous tension both geographically and socially. James C. Cobb (1994) has called it “the most southern place on earth” because of the area’s retention of many of the Old South’s harsher elements, while C. Van Woodward harrowingly detailed the vagaries of southern society and race relations in The Strange Career of Jim Crow ([1955a] 2001) and The Burden of Southern History ([1955b] 1993).9 The Band absorbed the pain and suffering of the Delta and its cultural milieu to produce something novel and unique, something powerful, something danceable.

David Emblidge, in his article, “Down Home With The Band: Country-Western Music and Rock” (1976), posits that The Band had “a sense of historical roots that yields a nostalgia without sentimentality, humor without biting satire, and a diversity of styles without a superficiality of skill. They concern themselves with ideas, people, settings, and a view of time unlike almost anyone else in the rock field” (541). The Band’s conscientiousness about their subject matter was prescient. Emblidge adds: “Few have actually identified with or at least expressed a deep-felt respect for the people and subculture that produced this musical tradition. The Band, however, is an outstanding exception.”

The Band were exceptional for the same reason my family were more adept at musicality than me. Many artists sang of the South, but the Band had lived it; when they traveled to the region, they, at once, felt at home. Robertson has said the influence of the South was always in his writing and that influence still colors his process. “I went with these naive eyes 16 years old to the South and I saw things,” Robertson told WGBH in Boston in a 1995 interview (“Rock and Roll”). “They go somewhere inside you and they just live there until I guess there is a time, a time to use them.”

Robertson fell under the spell of the Delta and the South more broadly at a very young age. At sixteen, his youth made him a conduit through which the shock and influence of the region could flow. “I went down to Arkansas and ultimately to the Mississippi Delta where rock and roll grows out of the ground,” Robertson recalls. “It overwhelmed me, it washed over me and I felt my job was to absorb as much as I could, as fast as I could” (Barber and O’Connor 2017). And absorb he did. Robertson connected with the Delta on an almost spiritual level. This influence would produce such songs as “Ophelia,” “The Weight, “King Harvest,” and most poignantly, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” the latter an intentional effort to describe the experience of the yeoman during the American Civil War. While the song is trouble- some in subject matter and in its embrace of Lost Cause sentiment, it showcases just how deeply Robertson cared about the South and the influence the area had on him during his time there. “Dixie” also gave Levon Helm an opportunity to show the world how the shared memory of pain and anguish sounds when given an authentic voice.

Seduced by the area and the way people talked and moved in a place with rhythm in the air, Robertson longed to write a song about the South (Viney 2000). His mission became to write a song that Levon “could sing better than anyone in the world” (Barber and O’Connor 2017). The result, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” would become one of The Band’s best-loved songs, and the vocal Helm delivered, one of the greatest in rock history. Coming in at two- hundred and forty-nine on Rolling Stone’s list of the “500 Greatest Songs of All Time (2004),” “Dixie” showcased Helm and the pain of memory in the South after the Civil War for the world to hear. It was raw, it was heartfelt, and it was genuine. Delivered with his raspy vocals and Arkansas drawl, Helm gave the plight of Virgil Kane life and with it, authenticity. While the recorded version is the most recognizable, it is the song’s performance in The Last Waltz, a 1978 Martin Scorsese rock documentary chronicling The Band’s final concert, where Helm gives his most heartfelt performance.10 Whether it was the occasion and the emotion of knowing this would be the song’s final live performance, or the tearing of the veil to reveal the pain the Civil War had on the Southern psyche, Helm spat the lines about Stoneman and Yankees with the vitriol re- served for only the fiercest enemies. Said Robert- son of the performance,” I don’t know if I’ve ever heard Levon sing and play ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,’ better than on this night. Looking back at him while he was singing a verse, I saw the horns behind him looking like some kind of glorious funeral procession. His truth in that vocal could tear your heart out” (The Music Aficianado 2016). Noted rock and roll writer Greil Marcus remarked that “Levon sang with an anger he’d never before given the song” (qtd. in Viney).

What people saw that night was more than anger, it was an outpouring of emotion attained by growing up within and absorbing the culture of a place torn between right and wrong and black and white. He felt what he sang because he bore the burden and weight of the subject matter. The scars of the Civil War have never healed in the South. Confederate flags still fly in yards, and apparel idealizing the southern way of life and southern heritage fly off the shelves in boutique stores. The experience of growing up in an area so affected by an event so long ago implants itself into the collective subconscious of southerners and refuses to give way.

Historians like David Goldfield (2003) have studied this phenomenon. Many white southerners chafe when it comes to how their heritage is represented by “outsiders” looking to revise and “correct” the historical record. Any description of the Civil War as anything less than a noble cause is often met with great resistance.12 Helm’s performance proves sometimes the soul of the South and the effect of this collective white heritage appears, whether intentional or not.

What set The Band apart from other acts of the day was their attention to detail and their musicianship. All five members were polymaths, mastering various instruments. They were also craftsmen, taking old pieces of American music and combining them to create something new that felt lived in and familiar. Carl Bernstein took the comparison further when reviewing a concert for the Washington Post in 1969: “The Band’s music is hewn from the rough, then honed and smoothed and polished until it glistens.” Three of the five men sang so well, the group had no official lead singer, a curiosity at a time when rock and roll’s premier frontmen strutted stages around the world. The band stood apart, an almost quiet reminder of something simpler, something innately American. They worked at their craft and sought perfection where they could, be- coming one of the most successful acts of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

What was the secret? Many bands were mining the music of the South for material. The Rolling Stones aped the style of blues musicians more than once, Eric Clapton worshipped Rob- ert Johnson, and Muddy Waters influenced countless musicians. Elvis Presley, without an ounce of hyperbole, changed the lives of a generation of young people, inspiring innumerable terrible garage bands and a few great ones. What lay at the heart of the success for a group whose majority membership came from Canada? What made them connect? Quite simply, it is the same precept that proves why I cannot play as well as my cousins: The Band’s heart and soul, its literal driving force and backbeat, was from the Delta and it bled out over every track.

I do not make this contention lightly. Other bands and artists had Arkansas and Mississippi roots, sure, but those that had the greatest impact came from a concentrated area, so rich with history, that simply breathing the air imbibed one with something special, a quality that many other musical acts mimicked but never fully attained. The Band would have been such a group if not for the contributions of Levon Helm. Helm’s childhood, filled with laborious days in the cotton fields, on tractors, and reveling at racy traveling shows like F.S. Walcott Rabbits Foot Minstrels, gave their music authenticity and believability (Helm and Davis 1993, 20). Those qualities would have proven unattainable without the soul of Helm’s lived experience, vocals, and musicality.

In fact, when The Hawks were enlisted as Bob Dylan’s backing band for his now legendary 1965 tour where Dylan would play electric for the first time, Levon felt the music had strayed too far from its purest form and that the audiences’ disapproval, shown nightly with unrelenting boo- ing, was a signal he should disembark from the tumultuous sojourn (Bowman 2005, 21). The joy of the occasion and the life in the music Helm felt should be there was absent; therefore the purpose of the thing was lost. Levon recalled, “I had the idea that soon the whole scheme of Ameri- can music was going to change. Songs were going to be about ideas beyond the simple solace of the blues or the old let’s ball tonight attitude of rock and roll” (Helm and Davis 1993, 133). Without the soul of American music driving the sound, Levon felt lost and would eventually leave the tour in 1966 (Bowman 21). In his tearful announcement to Robertson, Levon explained his reason for leaving: “To me, music’s always been some good chords and a tight rhythm section. This stuff is too damn powerful for me.” Helm continued: “Sometimes I am afraid of it. . . . To go from that to being point band for this style of music that Bob can hear, and the rest of us hear as much as we know how, and I myself can’t even really hear yet—I want to draw a line for myself” (Helm and Davis 1993, 140). Though the separation would not last long, it became pivotal to the way The Band would understand each other in years to come. Without the heart of the band, it was difficult to fully visualize Robertson’s vision. After the tour with Dylan, the remaining members of The Band toiled away in the basement of a house in upstate New York they nick- named “Big Pink.” They experimented with country, soul, and mountain music, specifically that of the Carter Family. It soon became apparent that something was missing. The music needed something else. That something was Levon Helm (Bowman 2005, 27).12 Robertson asked Rick Danko, the group’s bassist, to call Levon. Danko recalls, “I called Levon and said, ‘Levon we are going to make a record. They’re giving us a couple hundred thousand dollars and we would like to share. He said, ‘I’ll be on the next plane’” (27).

With all of the pieces now in place, The Band began what would be their most prolific period. Music From Big Pink (1968), their debut album, became an instant success. Listeners and other musicians were amazed at what The Band had produced. The sound they created with mainly acoustic instruments and traditional arrangements sounded like nothing else on the radio. Big Pink had such an effect on Eric Clap- ton, that he came to New York and tried to officially join the band (Bowman 2005, 7). The authenticity in their sound was now fully apparent and the rise to stardom came quickly. If Big Pink was special, their second album, eponymously titled The Band (1969), was an even greater success.

Filled with songs that would become concert staples, The Band further cemented the group’s place in musical history. With such songs as “Rag Mama Rag,” “Up On Cripple Creek,” “Rocking Chair,” “King Harvest Has Surely Come,” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” the album echoed the South and the people who called it home. At a time when psychedelic music and acid rock were becoming more prevalent, The Band sounded almost archaic. They harkened back to a simpler time. While there were electric instruments on the record, they were recorded in such a way as to make them unobtrusive to the whole. Mandolin, harmonica, accordion, and upright piano, instruments normally not present on popular records, lilted through the music. The use of traditional and folk instrumentation, while foreign to the majority of popular musicians of the time, proved a success. The Band became as respected as Big Pink and ushered in an era of more roots-oriented rock.

Many of The Band’s contemporaries began bringing more traditional elements to their work. More country-tinged rock appeared on the radio and climbed the charts. The Rolling Stones would rely heavily on country instrumentation and arrangements with “Tumbling Dice,” “Dead Flowers,” and “Wild Horses.”13 Neil Young re- leased Harvest, arguably his most successful album, in 1972. As noted by Allmusic.com, it be-came that year’s best-selling album and contains many of Young’s best-loved songs: “Heart of Gold,” “Old Man,” and “Are You Ready for the Country?” all feature heavily acoustic arrangements.

During this period Young took a particular interest in the American South, releasing singles “Southern Man” and “Alabama,” both biting critiques of the region’s racial inequality and white supremacy.15 The South’s troublesome history was laid bare for all to hear by a Canadian appalled at what he saw, while The Band, the bulk of which hailed from Canada, focused on the more inclusive aspects of the region and sought to highlight the confluence of cultures in their music.

What made their music different was that it put southern themes of land, race, and memory to music in a way that was widely consumable and not overtly preaching a message of reform or imploring the listener to involve themselves directly in actions to change an existing narrative. “Up on Cripple Creek,” the tale of a downtrodden “drunkard” gambler traveling “straight down the Mississippi” in search of the promised love of his paramour Bessie, reeks of rurality and southern cliché. “Rag Mama Rag” uses New Orleans influenced ragtime music to portray the lives of juke joint lovers, while “King Harvest,” gives a human voice to the struggle of tenant farmers and sharecroppers intent on organizing against the tyranny of white landowners who sought to maintain their economic advantages.16 Levon would have had a particular insight into these aspects of The Band’s music and a unique perspective on how to portray them. This overt influence of the South in The Band’s music would be its hallmark, and the fact that it was listed as written by Robertson only, without a co-writer, would become a contentious issue.
Robertson has long insisted that he alone was responsible for the lyrical content of The Band’s cannon, a fact that while feasible, seems preposterous if one simply asks the question, “How can a Canadian understand the area so deeply and with such nuance that he alone could write so clearly about the lives of those who live there?” Helm found this equally unbelievable, eventually having a very public falling out with Robertson over songwriting credits on many of The Band’s songs.

Robertson seems to admit as much in Barney Hoskyn’s Across The Great Divide: The Band and America (2006). “If there was something about the feeling in a song, an angle I couldn’t get,” Robertson explained, “Levon would always find ways to get the feel I hadn’t been able to express” (179). Perhaps Robertson’s infamous dearth of output after 1972 correlates to his lack of involving Helm and other members of the band in the writing process as much as previously (271). Perhaps it was due to Robertson not fully understanding the intricacies of the region he tried so hard to write about. As Jim Kelton sur- mises in his 2001 article in Blues Revue Magazine, “Save the Last Waltz for Sonny Boy,” Robertson only had a secondhand understanding of “the spirit of a genuine heritage drawn from the ex- periences of the millions who built the levees, cropped the shares, fished the rivers, and whooped and got drunk on Saturday nights to celebrate.” Furthermore, without an intimate relationship with, as Kelton describes it, “music that grew out of hoedowns and field hollers, juke joints and cotton-country barbecues, minstrelsy, sentiment, and richness of expression,” Robert- son was unable to tap into the traditions he, mistakenly, thought he understood. The South can be a troublesome muse, its juxtapositions being the rule far more than the exception.

In interviews, Robertson has struggled to convey how his creative process worked, how he, a Canadian, had such an intimate feel for the soul of a region so foreign to him. When asked about writing “The Weight” and the song’s origin by Ian Crouch of the New Yorker in 2016, Robertson opined, “I’m not too good at explain- ing song lyrics . . . but basically, it was all I could think of at that time. Like most songs I wrote, it was a combination of the real and mythical. That gave room for imagination and personalizing, along with vivid experiences.” Hardly the elocution expected by a man who wrote one of rock music’s greatest songs.

Maybe what Robertson failed to realize was that what he thought he had absorbed by traveling through the South and the Delta during his teens was only accessible when coupled with the lived experience Levon could lend to his writing. Robertson believed the South “was poetry coming to life. The names of the towns and the rivers, the names of all these characters, everything has its own rhythm down there” (Crouch 2016). Crouch rightly observes that writing about a subject so complex as the South without the needed context could be difficult, that “its brilliance is complicated, and tenuous, and in the wrong hands it fails completely.” The absence of an authentic view on a southern subject may have stymied Robertson’s creative process and gives impetus to Helm’s claims that Robertson “had pencil whipped us” and to his suggestion that after Robertson began to take full writing credit on the band’s songs, the band’s collaboration and creativity were “severely” curtailed (Helm and Davis 1993, 210). The animosity between the two would remain until Helm’s death in 2012. Neither man ever fully reconciled their differences over who contributed more to the process. Perhaps, this is why Robertson, Crouch believes, “came to be pegged as a flashy try-hard . . . the show-biz striver among artisans who just wanted to make beautiful noise,” while Helm is “perhaps the most widely loved of the all, a national treasure, with his feral grin, preternatural rhythm behind the drums, and singular Arkansas Delta growl” (2016). Without Helm’s southern bona fides and lived experience, the music Robertson sought to make would have been derivative.

Whether Levon Helm was an integral part of The Band’s creative process, or whether he was simply the backbeat, one cannot deny his in- fluence on their music. One can only attribute this to his delta roots and his not simply being a traveler passing through and soaking up some mythical aura. To Helm, the Delta was not some ethereal place others revered or a historical topic to study. The Delta was home and it taught life lessons and influenced him in a way that others could never experience no matter their interest or the amount of culture they sought to absorb. The Delta, a land of oppositions much like the greater South, is something that is also inside. It is in one’s bones and makes one part of a greater whole that also feels the weight of history and the promise of renewal.

Johnny Cash, an Arkansan raised in the Delta and a descendant of cotton farmers, carried that weight his whole career, more than once being called a walking contradiction, a man who could never reconcile his faith with his guilt. Robert Levine noted of Cash: “He was guided by faith, he never cared much for organized religion; he had a sense of himself as deeply flawed, but not beyond hope of redemption. Those contra- dictions . . . are what make him fascinating” (2009, 59). The weight of people’s lives in the Delta colors their emotional outlooks and subconsciously enables them to experience empathy and regret in a way others cannot. The way all of these elements meld together form a shared identity for those who experience it first-hand. Helm may have summed it up best when, in 2012, he described to Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air that “It sounds like we all got religion don’t it?”

This land, this Delta, is home to so much. The scars of the past are still raw in many areas. To drive through the Delta is to drive through a living contradiction. How can a land with soil so rich be home to so many who are so poor? How can a land so desolate create fields of plenty? How can it be so derelict and yet so full of life? The landscape is flat and the summer heat unrelenting. It is a place that leaves an indelible mark on those who experience it. Those who were lucky enough to be born there or to grow up in the region share a heritage that sets them apart from the rest of the nation, but whose heritage is it? Is there a prevailing heritage that we all share? I think the answer is two-fold. First, the area is Southern and there is the terrific burden that comes with that heritage, creating a bifurcated identity for the region. While there is no doubt a southern history and heritage, whose heritage one studies can lead to vastly different understandings of the South. The South is not techni- color; it is black and white. Whenever we discuss overarching narratives on what it means to be southern we must examine whose racial heritage we are studying, because one can be sure that differing perspectives will offer different understandings, equally unique and personal.

Second, and perhaps most promising, is the heritage people from the Delta share that is less about exclusion and race and more about inclusion and celebration. The Delta’s musical roots and the artists who have gone on to fame share a heritage that makes them unique among their contemporaries. What lives inside them is different. Inside them is the compartmentalization of all of the pain and violence, the hate and the hope, the god-fearing and the lecherous. Inside is a living contradiction that is not at all detrimental. In fact, it is a blessing. This contradiction, this perpetual tension gives them something special. Something Levon Helm most certainly had. This something, this delta je ne sais quoi, is what sets them apart. It is why the band could not have been The Band without him.

One might posit that I have put too much emphasis on place in this study. Perhaps I have, but this is simply because it is my contention that place is the defining factor responsible for the uniqueness of the sound of The Band and why Levon Helm’s inclusion in the group was integral to their success. The rurality of the lived experience in the Delta coupled with its troubled and racialized past are evident both in their recorded music and today when traveling across the re- gion. The economy of the region is still predominately agricultural. Confederate monuments guard courthouse lawns and schools still bear the names of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. The memory of what the South was is directly tied to what it is, no matter how hard we strive to dis- tance ourselves from it. The region seems to be caught in a Sisyphean effort to shake its history and move forward. Here, people are southern first and American second and this dichotomy creates a unique perspective. The shared experience of those who live there allows them the ability to produce and feel something unique. Levon Helm did and my cousins do. The rest of us cannot, no matter how hard we try.

Notes
1 Both Stockley and Whitaker, examine the Elaine Massacre in harrowing detail, exploring how the fears of whites stoked the violence and led to the wholesale slaughter of African-Ameri-cans in Elaine.

2 In addition to Stockley and Whitaker, there are many quality resources that explore the racial conditions in the American South and, in particular, Arkansas and the Delta. See American Congo: The African American Freedom Struggle in the Delta (Woodruff 2012) and The Elaine Massacre and Arkansas: A Century of Atrocity and Resistance, 1819-1919 (Lancaster 2018), for example.

3 C. Van Woodward addresses how the southern identity forms through its association with the varying and intersecting realities operating in the region in The Burden of Southern History. These vagaries and the intermingling of cultures and beliefs play a key role in how southerners view themselves and the world.

4 For a full representation of slide guitar played with Coricidin bottles and hollow bones, see the recorded work of Mississippi Fred McDowell and Muddy Waters.

5 Voodoo imagery and hoodoo rituals are present in many delta blues recordings. Muddy Waters, “Got My Mojo Workin’” and “Mannish Boy” make references to hoodoo imagery, particularly a John de Conquerer Root. Robert Johnson’s, “Hellhound on My Trail,” is another example of this type of imagery.

6 Hunter not only explores the lives of black women after the Civil War, she also examines the rise in their taking ownership over their bodies in how they danced and socialized.

7 Twitty relayed to Hawkins that there was a market for rockabilly and good pay for bands who wanted to tour in Canada.

8 “Sweetheart of the Rodeo” is one of the first recognized country-rock albums. Graham Parsons and his country influence pushed The Byrds toward a more country sound.

9 Cobb’s book, The Most Southern Place on Earth, is an intimate account of the social and political environment in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta and the role that race, religion, and culture play in shaping the psyche of the region. Wood- ward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow is a seminal study on race and violence in the American South. His The Burden of Southern History continues to explicate the region’s troublesome relationship with race and racial injustice.

10 The Last Waltz was bittersweet for Helm. Robertson’s inclinations to disband the group did not sit well and made for an awkward performance at times.

11 Goldfield discusses in detail the role memory and heritage play in the southern psyche. Lost Cause mythology permeates certain areas of the South making it difficult to address the war in any other respect without difficulty.

12 The Band’s struggle to find itself after the Dylan tour was exacerbated by the absence of Helm who had returned to the South and worked odd jobs in order to make a living after leaving the tour.

13 Both Sticky Fingers and Exile On Main Street, released in 1971 and 1972 respectively, relied on country-infused rhythms and subject matter. Keith Richards’s friendship with Graham Parsons led to many country-infused collaborations, particularly 1971’s “Wild Horses.”

14 Harvest contains many of Young’s signature songs and its stripped down acoustic/folk came to define much of his career. The influence of The Band was prevalent in much of his work for the latter half of the 1960s and early 1970s. Young appeared at The Last Waltz, performing a rousing though drug-addled version of “Helpless” with The Band and Joni Mitchell.

15 “Southern Man” appears on Young’s After the Gold Rush (1970). “Alabama” is the eighth track on Harvest. Young’s indictment of southern politics and race relations were at the heart of these songs. Traveling the South on tour, Young was appalled at the treatment of African-Ameri- cans. “Southern Man,” would later become the influence for Lynyrd Skynyrd’s, “Sweet Home Alabama.”

16 The Band was filled with references to aspects of southern life that were previously ignored by white musicians. These songs, with heavy black influence, were soul/R&B/blues influenced, without being derivative.

References
Barber, Simon, and Brian O’Connor. 2017. “Sodajerker presents . . . Robbie Robertson.”

Songwriting Magazine (online), May 14. Bernstein, Carl. 1969. “The Band.” The Washing- ton Post. October 28. Archived on The Band website, Library>Articles. theband.hiof.no.

Bowman, Rob. 2005. The Band: A Musical History. Los Angeles: Capitol Records.

Cobb, James C. 1994. The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity. Oxford: Oxford UP.

Crouch, Ian. 2016. “Robbie Robertson Offers His Story of the Band.” The New Yorker (on-line), December 8.

Edwards, Leigh. 2009. Johnny Cash and The Paradox of American Identity. Bloomington: U of Indiana P. 2009

Emblidge, David. 1976 “Down Home With The Band: Country-Western Music and Rock.”

Ethnomusicology 20.3 (September): 541-552. Goldfield, David. 2003. Southern Histories: Public Personal and Scared. Athens: U of Georgia Press.

Helm, Levon and Stephen Davis. 1993. This Wheel’s On Fire: Levon Helm and the Story of The Band. Chicago: Chicago Review Press.

Helm, Levon. 2002. “Fresh Air.” Interviewed by Terry Gross. NPR, April 19. freshairarchive.org/segments/levon-helm.

Hoskyns, Barney. Across the Great Divide: The Band and America. 2006. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard.

Hunter, Tera W. 1998. To Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War. Cambridge: Harvard UP.

Kelton, Jim. 2001. “Save The Last Waltz For Sonny Boy.” Blues Revue Magazine, issue no. 72, November.

Lancaster, Guy. 2018. The Elaine Massacre and Arkansas: A Century of Atrocity and Resistance, 1819-1919. Little Rock: Butler Center for Arkansas Studies.

Music Aficionado, The. 2016. “The Night They Drive Old Dixie Down, by The Band.” The Music Aficiando Blog. musicaficionado.blog, April 25.

Robertson, Robbie. 2019. “Bio.” Robbie Robertson. robbie-robertson.com.

“Rock and Roll; Shakespeares in The Alley; Interview with Robbie Robertson [Part 3 of 4].” 1995. GBH Archives. openvault.wgbh.org, September.

Rogers, Bryan. “Levon Helm.” 2019. Encyclopedia of Arkansas (online). January 22.

Rolling Stone. 2003. “500 Greatest Songs of All Time (2004).” Rollingstone.com, December 11. www.rollingstone.com/music/music- lists/500-greatest-songs-of-all-time-151127/the-band-the-night-they-drove-old-dixie-down-2-57121/

Stockley, Grif. 2004. Blood In Their Eyes: The Elaine Race Massacres of 1919. Fayetteville: U of Arkansas P.

Viney, Peter. 2000. “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down (Revisited).” Archived on The Band Website, Library>Articles. theband.hiof.no.

Whitaker, Robert. 2009. On The Laps of Gods: The Red Summer of 1919 and the Struggle for Justice That Remade a Nation. New York: Broadway Books.

Woodruff, Nan Elizabeth. 2012. American Congo: The African American Freedom Struggle in the Delta. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P.

Woodward. C. Van. (1955a) 2001. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. New York: Oxford UP, 2001. ———. (1955b) 1993.

The Burden of Southern History. Baton Rouge: U of Louisiana P.

Discography
The Band. 1968. Music From Big Pink. Capitol Records.
———. 1969 The Band. Capitol Records.
———. 1978. The Last Waltz. Warner Bros.

The Byrds. 1968. Sweetheart of the Rodeo.

Mississippi Fred McDowell. 1969. I Do Not Play No Rock and Roll. Malaco Records.

Muddy Waters. 1955. “Manish [sic] Boy,” b-side “Young Fashioned Ways.” Chess.

Muddy Waters. 1957. “Got My Mojo Working,” b-side “Rock Me.” Chess.

Neil Young. 1972. Harvest. Reprise.

They are great and I am grateful they chose this piece.