The Rumor

I'm going to ride out the month posting a song each day composed or co-written by Robbie Robertson.  Today it's The Rumor from The Band's third album, Stage Fright.   Like many of their finest, it features vocals from Richard Manuel, Rick Danko, and Levon Helm.   With swirling organ from Garth Hudson.  Lyrics and music by Robertson.

And here's an appreciation of Robertson from Jeff Blehar, who does the Political Beats music podcast which, several years ago ran a three hour appreciation of the music of The Band.  Of their second album, The Band, he writes:

The Band was a landmark of popular music and remains so to this day. (It is without hyperbole one of the ten or so greatest popular music albums ever recorded.) 

It is difficult to fully convey how singular an album The Band is. From its brown and stark-toned cover photograph to its twelve songs, it uniquely exists both in and of its time and outside of chronological time altogether. This is an album from 1969 that massively affected the future course of popular music along multiple genres, yet could have just as easily been released in 1869 (look out, Cleveland!) — and I suppose that is the point. Robbie Robertson took the lessons he learned from diving alongside Dylan deep into American traditional song and transfigured them into what can only be described as a miraculously perfect summary of America’s own mythologized understanding of itself.