When Garth Hudson joined the Hawks, the group that became The Band, in the early 1960s, his parents were worried about their classically trained son playing in a rock and roll bar band. So the other members agreed to pay him a little extra each week to give them music lessons, which made it a respectable job. Hudson, the last surviving member of The Band, died on January 21, 2025, in New York State. He was 87.
A classically trained rocker
Hudson was born in 1937 and grew up in London, Ontario, in a musical family. He studied classical music and played the organ in church before joining Ronnie Hawkins’s backing group, the Hawks, alongside Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, Rick Danko and Richard Manuel. After leaving Hawkins, the Hawks became Bob Dylan’s backing band on his 1965 and 1966 tours, when Dylan’s audiences booed him for going electric and the musicians played on through the noise.
Big Pink and The Last Waltz
Living near Woodstock, New York, they recorded The Basement Tapes with Dylan and then, as The Band, released Music from Big Pink in 1968. “The Weight” became one of the best-known songs of the era. Hudson’s organ introduction to “Chest Fever”, improvised on stage and later called “The Genetic Method”, became a showpiece of their concerts. He also played saxophone, accordion and synthesisers, and the textures he added are a large part of why The Band’s records still sound unlike anyone else’s. Their farewell concert in 1976 was filmed by Martin Scorsese as The Last Waltz.
The last of five
The Band were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994. Richard Manuel died in 1986, Rick Danko in 1999, Levon Helm in 2012 and Robbie Robertson in 2023. Hudson kept playing as a session musician for artists including Norah Jones and Neko Case and lived quietly in his later years.
Hudson was the one member of The Band who did not sing lead, in a group with three distinctive singers, yet his organ, accordion and horn parts run through almost every song they recorded.