Testimony

When he was 16, Robbie Robertson left Canada and moved to Arkansas to play guitar and pen songs with Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks. That’s where he hooked up with drummer Levon Helm and formed a lifelong bond. They collected three more stellar musicians—Rick Danko, Garth Hudson and Richard Manuel, all Canadians—and created the band/club/brotherhood called The Band, and the group broke musical conventions to create a seminal Americana sound. In his autobiography Testimony, Robertson recounts this musical journey, weaving his own internal questions and observations throughout, including incredulity when Bob Dylan tapped The Band to run the gauntlet as his backup musicians while the folksinger made the unpopular move from acoustic to electric. A natural storyteller, Robertson reveals his encompassing love for the blues and for movies, and offers the inside scoop on how The Band’s finale would be forever preserved in the musician-studded Martin Scorsese-directed movie The Last Waltz.