A while back, I was watching one of those "the making of an album" documentary discs. This one was about the year The Band made their self titled album The Band. I thought it was a hoot to hear all these music critic types talking about how this album represented the beginnings of a rebirth of interest in "Americana" music.

Here's a group of musicians, four-fifths of whom hadn't been further south then Ontario Canada until they started playing professional music, and they're being credited with being the focal point for the rebirth of interest in American folk music. It's not as if their early professional career had much to do with it either. They started off playing behind "Rompin" Ronnie Hawkins ("The Hawk") who was pure Rock & Roll.

Heck, he was so un-American that he left Arkansas and moved to Canada where he's lived since the sixties. He was the undisputed King of the scene in Toronto, and anybody who was anybody stayed with him out in his suburban home in Mississauga on the outskirts of Toronto. In 1969, when John Lennon showed up, he stayed out there, as did Janis Joplin and other luminaries of the era.

Since the old time music influence didn't come from that Good Ole Boy, it must have come from the fifth member in the band who just happened to hail from Ronnie's home state of Arkansas, Levon Helm. After all it was Levon who wrote "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down", and his was the only voice that sounded like it should be singing "The Weight". With all due respect to Rick Danko, an Ontario accent just doesn't cut it for something that sounds like Southern Gospel music.

As I tend to be out of touch when it comes to news about people's personal life, it was only upon watching that same video that I found out Levon was in recovery from throat cancer. He had never been the biggest of men, and now he looked almost cadaverous. His voice, not the most dulcet of instruments in the first place, could only have sustained God knows what damage from chemotherapy, surgery, and cancer. I never thought I'd hear him sing again.

Then last year I reviewed a Holmes Brother album, and, lo and behold, there was Levon and Amy Helm singing vocals on one song. The voice might have sounded a bit thin, and even rougher around the edges than ever before - but it still had the same character and emotional depth that I remembered from his days in The Band and his sporadic solo career. It was great to hear him again, but I still didn't think there would be an album forthcoming anytime soon.

Never have I been so glad to be wrong; Vanguard Records has just released Dirt Farmer, Levon's first disc since his diagnosis and treatment for his throat cancer in 1998. In honour, and probably with a whole bunch of gratitude, of being allowed to come back again to health and a career, he chose to make this disc in homage to the people who first got him interested in music - his parents.