WHO ELSE WAS GONNA BRING YOU A BROKEN ARROW?:

Jaime Royal "Robbie" Robertson, the guitarist and principal songwriter for The Band, died on Aug. 9, 2023. He was 80 years old.

Robertson was born in my hometown of Toronto, raised by a mother from Canada's Mohawk First Nation and an Anglo-Canadian father, both of them working class. They separated when he was a teenager, at which point his mother revealed that his father was not really his father. His biological father had been a Jewish gambling man but had died by the time Robbie learned of him, and his mother felt it was somehow important that Robbie finally meet his father's brother and sister.

This is the stuff of mythology. An Orpheus-like hero who is born poor, is separated from his father, and then finds out that his father is not really his father. A boy who becomes a young man, who looks "white" but is half "Indian," experiences some of the deep prejudices of Canadian society against native peoples at the time, and then learns about American Roots music from his kin on a reservation.

A boy whose ear is close to the radio in the '50s and early '60s and gets his start playing blues, rhythm and blues, rock, rockabilly, and country in the burgeoning clubs of Toronto during the 1960s. He then meets up with two of the most unlikely outsiders that Toronto has ever hosted, rockabilly star Ronnie Hawkins and drummer Levon Helm, both from Arkansas.

In retrospect one can say that Robertson's acquaintance with these two American Southerners was the point when his hero's journey started in earnest. 

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