R.I.P. Garth Hudson, last surviving member of The Band
Garth Hudson, keyboardist and last surviving founding member of the Canadian-American rock group The Band, has died. Though cause of death has not been confirmed, the Toronto Star reports he died in his sleep at a nursing home in Woodstock, New York on Tuesday morning. Producer and music archivist Jan Haust, Hudson’s longtime friend and colleague, further confirmed to Rolling Stone that Hudson "died peacefully" and "yesterday was a day of music and hand-holding." Hudson was 87 years old.
Hudson was born in London, Ontario, and was a recognized musical prodigy from a young age. After attending the Toronto Conservatory, he developed an interest in rock and roll music. He joined the Capers, with whom he backed up touring musicians like Johnny Cash and Bill Haley, and later Ronnie Hawkins' backing band the Hawks with Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, Richard Manuel, and Rick Danko. When Hawkins and the Hawks split, the backing band partnered with Bob Dylan. ("Like everyone else who encounters Garth for the first time, Bob was blown away," Helm wrote of Dylan's reaction to a Hawks performance, per Rolling Stone). The team-up marked a watershed moment in rock history during Dylan's transition to electric; the group toured together in the mid-1960s and later collaborated on The Basement Tapes, partially released in 1975 and released in full in 2014 thanks to the work of Hudson and Haust.
The Band went on to become a respected entity in their own right outside their work with Dylan. They released Music From Big Pink (named after the house where several members, including Hudson, stayed in Woodstock) in 1968 and The Band in 1969, both critically acclaimed and highly influential records of the era. Despite internal conflicts, the Band continued to tour, release music, and eventually re-team with Dylan throughout the '70s. Their farewell concert was documented in Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz, after which the group reunited sporadically in various iterations of the lineup.
Outside of the Band, Hudson worked as a session musician, sought-after by musical devotees like Wilco, Norah Jones, Neko Case, and Doug Paisley. He worked on a number of other projects in the 2000s, including his debut solo album The Sea To The North (2001) and the cover album Garth Hudson Presents: A Canadian Celebration Of The Band (2010). The multi-instrumentalist continued to perform publicly as recently as 2023.