Jaime Royal “Robbie” Robertson, the guitarist and principal songwriter for The Band, died on Aug. 9, 2023. He was 80 years old.
Robertson was born in my hometown of Toronto, raised by a mother from Canada’s Mohawk First Nation and an Anglo-Canadian father, both of them working class. They separated when he was a teenager, at which point his mother revealed that his father was not really his father. His biological father had been a Jewish gambling man but had died by the time Robbie learned of him, and his mother felt it was somehow important that Robbie finally meet his father’s brother and sister.
