Canadian guitarist Robbie Robertson, founder of American-Canadian folk and rock band The Band, died Wednesday at the age of 80, his manager told Variety magazine. A collaborator of Bob Dylan, Robertson wrote the most famous songs of his group The Band, active from the late 1960s to the middle of the following decade: The Weight, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down and Up On Cripple Creek.

According to his agent, quoted by Variety, Robertson died surrounded by his family but without knowing the precise cause of his death. He was born on July 5, 1943 in Toronto, Canada to a Native American mother. As a teenager, he went on the roads of itinerant music festivals, before joining a number of small music groups. “I’ve been playing guitar for so long I can’t remember when I started,” he told Rolling Stone magazine in 1968. “I guess I got into rock like everyone else,” he said humbly.

This guitarist and composer then founded a group in the 1960s, which he eventually baptized The Band, with Levon Helm on vocals and drums, Garth Hudson on keyboards and saxophone, Richard Manuel on piano, drums and vocals. vocals and Rick Danko on bass.

From Woodstock to the movies

Hudson is the last survivor of the group, which collaborated in force with Dylan in particular on the album Blonde on Blonde. A typical group of folk and rock in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, The Band leaves anthology pieces like The Weight, a mixture of folk, country and gospel, evoking the great wild spaces and the south of the country. . The group was also at the legendary Woodstock festival in 1969 and produced the albums Music from Big Pink, The Band and Cahoots.

The Band’s farewell concert in San Francisco in 1976 was immortalized on screen two years later in filmmaker Martin Scorsese’s documentary The Last Waltz, which paved the way for feature films on rock. Robertson then became close to Martin Scorsese, who hired him as a musician for his films Casino and Gangs of New York.

The guitarist no longer went on tour, but he then released a number of solo albums and cultivated a character appreciated by rock and folk audiences and the small circle of American poetry. “I thought of a few words that led me to others,” he told Rolling Stone of his masterpiece The Weight.