At age 17, Helm began playing in clubs and bars around Helena. Helm also witnessed some of the earliest performances by early rock and roll and rockabilly artists, including Elvis Presley, Conway Twitty, Bo Diddley and fellow Arkansan Ronnie Hawkins. Helm established his first band, the Jungle Bush Beaters, while in high school. In his 1993 autobiography, This Wheel's on Fire: Levon Helm and the Story of The Band, Helm describes watching Williamson's drummer, James 'Peck' Curtis, intently during a live performance in the early 1950s and later imitating this R&B drumming style. Wolcott's Original Rabbit's Foot Minstrels, which featured top Black artists of the era.ДЄ key early influence on Helm was Sonny Boy Williamson II, who played electric blues and early rhythm and blues on the King Biscuit Time radio show on KFFA in Helena and performed regularly in Marvell with blues guitarist Robert Lockwood, Jr. He also saw the last vestiges of minstrelsy and other traveling variety shows, such as F. Helm was influenced by each of these styles, which he heard on the Grand Ole Opry on radio station WSM and R&B on radio station WLAC in Nashville. Helm began playing the guitar at the age of eight and also played drums.ДЄrkansas in the 1940s and '50s stood at the confluence of a variety of musical styles, including traditional Delta blues, electric blues, country (including old-time music) and the incipient genre of rhythm and blues. He saw Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys at the age of six and decided to become a musician. They encouraged their children to play and sing at a young age. His parents, Nell and Diamond Helm, were cotton farmers who shared a strong affinity for music. Д«orn Mark Lavon Helm in Elaine, Arkansas, Helm grew up in Turkey Scratch, a hamlet of Marvell, Arkansas. In 2016, Rolling Stone magazine ranked him No.В 22 in its list of 100 Greatest Drummers of All Time. In 2011, his live album Ramble at the Ryman won the Grammy in the same category. In 2010, Electric Dirt, his 2009 follow-up to Dirt Farmer, won the first Grammy Award for Best Americana Album, a category inaugurated in 2010. His 2007 comeback album Dirt Farmer earned the Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album in February 2008, and in November of that year, Rolling Stone magazine ranked him No.В 91 in its list of 100 Greatest Singers of All Time. After treatment, his cancer eventually went into remission, and he gradually regained the use of his voice. In 1998, Helm was diagnosed with throat cancer which caused him to lose his singing voice. Helm also had a successful career as a film actor, appearing as Loretta Lynn's father in Coal Miner's Daughter (1980), as Chuck Yeager's friend and colleague Captain Jack Ridley in The Right Stuff (1983), as a Tennessee firearms expert in Shooter (2007), and as General John Bell Hood in In the Electric Mist (2009).

Helm was known for his deeply soulful, country-accented voice, multi-instrumental ability, and creative drumming style, highlighted on many of the Band's recordings, such as ' The Weight', ' Up on Cripple Creek', and ' The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down'. Mark Lavon 'Levon' Helm (May 26, 1940В вЂ“ April 19, 2012) was an American musician and actor who achieved fame as the drummer and one of the three lead vocalists for The Band.

Helm of raedwald explained