The death of Jaime Robbie Robertson this week had lots of baby-boomers-and-people-who-love-them returning to some of his classic songs with The Band: “The Weight,” “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” “Chest Fever,” and so on.
For me, I went back to a song of Robbie’s that appeared on one of The Band’s lesser-known, later efforts: “Rags and Bones,” from their 1975 album Northern Lights—Southern Cross:
Catch a taxi to the fountainhead
Blinking neon penny arcade
A young Caruso on the fire escape
Painted face ladies on parade
The newsboy on the corner
Singing out headlines
And a fiddler selling pencils
The sign reads: Help the blind
Coming up the lane callin’;
Working while the rain’s falling
Ragman, your song of the street
Keeps haunting my memory…
“Rags and Bones” evokes an immigrant saga in the New World at the turn of the 20th century. It could be one of many North American cities, although in this case it happens to be Toronto. And it’s significant because it’s as close as Robbie Robertson ever got to really exploring his Jewish roots with The Band, a motley assemblage some of the most important musicians of the rock era.
For those who don’t share my obsessions, here’s a quick background. In the late 1950s—really at the dawn of rock and roll—a teenage Robbie Robertson joined up with a Canadian rockabilly group called Ronnie Hawkins & the Hawks, where he quickly became not only a skilled lead guitarist, but also a prolific songwriter. The group traveled around North America, where they became intimately familiar with indigenous American music (including rock, country, and blues) and indigenous American dysfunction (racism).
But their immortality came from hooking up with Bob Dylan, providing the electric backing for him in 1965 and in his world-changing tour of 1966. After that, they moved to Woodstock and, under the very democratic moniker “The Band”, began producing some of the greatest music of the 1960s.
The rest of the story of The Band is important: Watkins Glen in 1973 with the Dead and the Allman Brothers, the largest rock concert of all time; the barnstorming 1974 tour with Dylan; the tragic self-induced chemical hell that consumed so many of the generation, including Band members Richard Manuel and Rick Danko. And of course the legendary “final show” on Thanksgiving Day 1976 that was filmed as The Last Waltz. But those are just the broad outlines.
Robbie Robertson is never included in those perennial lists of “Jews in Rock.” His songwriting, incredibly rich as it is, rarely has allusions to Judaism or the Bible beyond its mythic status. (There are exceptions, like “Daniel and the Sacred Harp.” Although I’ve read that Robertson insisted that the line “I pulled into Nazareth” in “The Weight” refers to Nazareth, Pennsylvania.) But it’s noteworthy just how many Jewish musicians were part of Dylan’s revolutionary mid-60s scene, including Mike Bloomfield, Al Kooper, and Harvey Brooks (who still advertises his services as a music teacher in Jerusalem).
As Robbie Robertson tells it, his mother Dolly was Mohawk, and he spent part of his Canadian childhood on the Six Nations Reservation where she had grown up. The man whom young Robbie was told was his father was named Jim Robertson, an alcoholic who abused Robbie and his mother. Eventually Dolly and Jim split up.
It was a few years later in late adolescence that Robbie discovered the identity of his real father: a man named Alexander David Klegerman, a Toronto hustler and gambler and the child of Jewish immigrants, who had fallen in love with Robbie’s mother. Alex was apparently a pretty sketchy figure. Long before Robbie’s maturation, he was killed in a hit-and-run, which was rumored on the streets not to have been an accident.
Robbie learned this from his uncles Morrie and Natie Klegerman, Jewish underworld figures who took a liking to the kid. In his 2016 autobiography Testimony, Robbie wrote about regular trips to the heart of Toronto’s Jewish neighborhood, and how even though it was completely different from his upbringing in the suburbs or on the reservation, it struck something deep in his soul.
The most Jewish event in Testimony occurs when Morrie and Natie take teenage Robbie to meet his paternal grandfather for the first time. Shmuel Chaim Klegerman was a devout Yiddish-speaking Jew. Robbie describes their introduction this way:
The old man trembled with emotion. He put his hand on his chest and lowered his head as if in prayer. Then slowly he raised his eyes to look at me, a combination of joy and sorrow on his face. I felt frozen in the moment as he studied me, searching, I’m sure, for traces of his departed son. He gave a nod of recognition and a tear rolled down his cheek.
Then he spoke in English. “Alex was my favorite. Your father was my favorite.” I managed a slight smile in acknowledgement before glancing at Natie with sympathy, concerned he’d be upset by his father’s stark favoritism, but he waved it off—as if it didn’t bother him in the least. He signaled for me to join them. I walked over and took both their outreached hands, profoundly moved by the whole experience. But though I knew Natie meant for it to bring me closer, in this strange new world I still couldn’t help feeling like an outsider. (Robbie Robertson, Testimony, p.66)
His Uncle Natie said, “Well, Jaime, how about that? I bet you didn’t know you were Jewish.”
Again, this background doesn’t make Robbie Robertson a “Jewish songwriter.” But it seems important to me that someone who spent so much time exploring the mythology of America in his writing has a strong fiber of Judaism running through his makeup.
In the liner notes to Northern Lights—Southern Cross, Robbie recalled Old Toronto (again, in language that could just as well describe Old Boston, or Newark, or Baltimore, or a dozen other places in the New World):
People would come from the old country that were intellectuals and scholars… I had a grandfather who was one of these people. He was an intellectual but he made his living in Toronto as a rag man. I remember as a little kid, there was a lane behind our home and I remember hearing this guy coming up the land singing this song ‘Rags and bones, old iron.”
…As a kid, there was something a little scary about this. Then, years later finding out that it had a connection to my heritage inspired me to write this song.
The song was “Rags and Bones,” with its refrain:
Keep haunting my memory
Music in the air
I hear it everywhere
Rags, bones, and old city songs
One of Robbie Robertson’s gifts is to remind us that the collective culture we call “Americana” is a polyglot of immigrant stories—including the stories of transplanted Jews. Like Philip Roth—and, for that matter, Bob Dylan—Robbie Robertson’s legacy is much bigger than “Jewish writing.” But his (North) American writing includes Judaism in its DNA, an important acknowledgment that our presence here is as authentic and distinct as anyone else’s. And, for that matter, it reminds us that to begin to understand “America” includes understanding the story of the Jewish experience here.
That was one of his blessings to us—alongside some of the most immortal songs of the century.
!יהי זכרו ברוך
Image: Bob Dylan and Robbie Robertson, Forest Hills, New York, 1965 © Daniel Kramer