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As the daughter of The Band’s Levon Helm, Amy Helm is rock royalty. Gifted with a gorgeous, powerful voice, she has forged a fine career for herself as both an interpreter of songs and with her own original material. Her recent set at The Hamilton Live in DC showed off her remarkable singing and the great material from her latest album, Silver City, which came out last year.
Like her Dad, Amy plays distinctly American music, with roots in folk, country, bluegrass, and gospel, filtered through rock ‘n’ roll. This was as true when she played with the band Ollabelle — who briefly reunited last summer, including an appearance in our area at the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage — as it is in her four solo albums. She’s as comfortable covering a traditional classic like “Didn’t It Rain” — a tall order for any vocalist, given its treatment by the incredible Sister Rosetta Tharpe. But Amy’s version is spectacular — as she is with original material like “Sweet Mama” and “Rescue Me.”
Levon settled in Woodstock, where his barn became the setting for the famed Midnight Ramble series of roots music concerts in later years. Although Amy lives in Woodstock too now, she talks about how much she’s indebted to her Southern roots. Introducing “Dear Louisiana,” she talked about how Levon’s family came from deep poverty in Turkey Scratch, Arkansas, where they worked as sharecroppers for generations. (The South has some truly incredible place names, like Monkey’s Eyebrow, the hometown of singer-songwriter Kelsey Waldon, and Mud Lick, the kayfabe residence of ’80s WWF Hillbilly Jim. We don’t have names like this where I grew up in Kansas and Ohio.)
Amy and her band opened with a track from Silver City, “Baby Come Back.” The set included several of her newer songs — the aforementioned “Dear Louisiana,” album opener “Love Supreme” (which is nothing like the Miles Davis composition of the same name), “Amen Anyway,” “If I Was King,” and “Money on 7.” There were also a number of old favorites, like “Carry It Alone” and “Are We Running Out Of Love.” She finished her main set with another of those, “Sweet Mama.”
Watch Amy Helm perform “Sweet Mama” live at AmericanaFest 2024 on YouTube:
One of the evening’s most poignant moments came in Amy’s encore, when she paid tribute to Garth Hudson, who passed away not long ago. The Band’s eccentric genius, a multi-instrumentalist savant who played sax and organ, it’s ironic that the oldest member of the group was the last to leave this world. Though they couldn’t do his famed part from “Chest Fever,” as they didn’t “have the rig” (and, to be fair, no one can duplicate Garth’s brilliant work), they did play a spirited version of one of The Band’s classic songs that served as a reminder of just how powerful their music and their legacy is in popular music.
I wasn’t familiar with the opener, Elizabeth Lyman, who performs as Elizabeth and the Catapult, but she was an enjoyable and engaging addition to the evening. Her set consisted almost entirely of new material because, as she explained, she’s about to make a record. After opening with “The Birds and the Bees,” she played a song about her great aunt Arlene, who recently passed away at the age of 93. She followed that with a tune “for the new year,” then switched from piano to guitar. At the end of her set, she brought out her musical partner, Adam, who also played in Amy’s band, for a couple of songs.
The legacy of Levon Helm and The Band is a lot to live with — in his tribute to Hudson, the Hold Steady’s Franz Nicolay called them “the best band in the history of the universe.” But it doesn’t cast a shadow over Amy — she’s a brilliant musician and performer, and her music stands up completely on its own. And on Jan. 23, she was absolutely singing her ass off.
Here are some photos of Amy Helm performing at The Hamilton Live on Jan. 23, 2025. All pictures copyright and courtesy of James Todd Miller.
Here are some photos of Elizabeth and the Catapult opening Amy Helm at The Hamilton Live on Jan. 23, 2025. All pictures copyright and courtesy of James Todd Miller.