Robbie Robertson

Robbie Robertson wrote most of the songs that made The Band immortal, and played the spare, stinging guitar that ran through them. Raised in Toronto with family roots at the Six Nations reserve, he joined Ronnie Hawkins as a teenager and grew into one of rock's most literary songwriters.

The songwriter

“The Weight,” “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” “Up on Cripple Creek,” “Stage Fright” — the catalogue of cinematic, character-driven Americana is largely his. He had a novelist's eye for the overlooked life, and a gift for writing songs that sounded a century old.

The credit question

That very authorship became the group's great fault line. Robertson took sole or majority credit on most songs; Levon Helm and others insisted the music was forged collectively in the room. The disagreement — about money, but also about memory and recognition — estranged Robertson and Helm for decades.

After The Band

Robertson engineered the group's grand exit with The Last Waltz, then built a substantial solo career and a decades-long partnership with director Martin Scorsese, scoring or supervising music for films from Raging Bull to Killers of the Flower Moon. He published a vivid memoir, Testimony, in 2016, and was the subject of the documentary Once Were Brothers. He died in 2023.