Levon Helm

By The Week Staff

last updated 8 January 2015

Levon Helm

Dirt Farmer

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At 67, Levon Helm resonates as a “voice of experience, humbled as well as emboldened,” said Nate Chinen in The New York Times. Dirt Farmer, his first solo record in 25 years, marks more than just a return to the studio for the former singer-drummer of the Band. It is a testament to his musical spirit and personal fortitude. In 1998, Helm lost his voice after a diagnosis of throat cancer. He miraculously recovered by playing with his friends at the Midnight Rambles he held in his Woodstock, N.Y., barn. Helm has come back a little older, plenty wiser, and surprisingly stronger. With the “big-hearted, old-fashioned sound” of Dirt Farmer, he “conjures a proud, plain ideal of American music.” It’s a terrain Helm knows well, said David Fricke in Rolling Stone. The son of an Arkansas cotton farmer, he experienced the “hard labor, family ties, and Dixie fireside tales that were the roots and soil of guitarist Robbie Robertson’s songs.” He breathes life into the traditional “Blind Child” and seasons Steve Earle’s “The Mountain” with his sprawling Southern yowl. There’s an organic quality to Dirt Farmer, said Karen Schoemer in New York. Helm reaches into these relic works and “seizes the Southern pastoralism that always lurked in the Band’s music.” All on his own, Helm summons back into being his compatriots’ “gritty, rollicking, joyous, melancholic, and even absurd wonder.”