Titans stride through The Last Waltz, Martin Scorsese’s elegiac documentary about The Band, the mostly-Canadian supergroup who started out backing Bob Dylan and finished up as unlikely conservators of Southern-American music and culture. But no matter who else is around—Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Muddy Waters—I can never take my eyes off of Levon Helm when he’s onscreen: That lean, scruffy, wolfishly handsome face; a knife-blade of rural cunning in a well-traveled sheath.

All Band fans have their favorite Band singer, but nothing defines the group in public perception so much as Helm’s iconic vocal turn on “The Weight.” His drumming, like his voice, was both powerful and ragged, freighted with the farmer’s weary persistence. Helm’s body language was that of a lifelong hustler: an intractable yet skewed set to his shuffling shoulders, like a man dealing marked cards. In the interviews, he was taciturn, with a mildly-impish version of courtly Southern manners, very calm in affect. Yet there was a riot in his eyes: a mischievous gleam, backlit by a deep wound or haunting that only vanished when he sang, and then only because his eyes were shut tight. Those eyes make me interpret his body language as a drummer differently—as that of a man with an immense weight on his heaving shoulders.

As the only genuine Southerner in a band that mythologized the American South, Helm did have an insupportable folkloric payload to bear. He was part Paul Bunyon, part Atlas. He actually grew up in place called Turkey Scratch, Arkansas; he actually had cotton-farming parents with the unbearably poignant names of Nell and Diamond. Helm could sing “like my father before me/ I will work the land,” and mean it. He was the heart and soul of the Band, disgorged from the very soil they mythologized, carrying it under his fingernails, drenched in its local idioms—blues, country, folk, rock, gospel. There was always something of the loner or outcast about him: His bandmates measured the land against their dreams, but Helm took his own measure against the land, always threatening to buckle under all that history.

Helm’s physical aspect—the wounded hustler—expresses the series of exiles that have informed his life. First, he was torn from the native soil he loved so well, to distant Canada, to play with Ronnie Hawkins’ band, the Hawks. The South, for Helm, was forfeit, but he still had the dream of it he created with his bandmates—and at a time when the South that Helm idealized was faded, its ugliness overwriting its virtues in the collective consciousness, perhaps the dream seemed more sustainable. But the Band gradually broke apart like the dream itself, and he lost that as well. He still had his voice, a column of flame in which Southern traditions were transfigured, and then he lost that too, to throat cancer, around the turn of the millennium—an entirely too-symbolic moment for the avatar of vanishing American idioms to fall silent.