R.I.P.: Garth Hudson, Last Surviving Member of The Band

Garth Hudson (1923-2025)

Garth Hudson, the last surviving member of The Band died on Tuesday in Woodstock, N.Y. He was 87 reports The NYTimes.

Hudson did far more than play the organ. A musical polymath whose work room at home included arcana like sheet music for century-old standards and hymns, he played almost anything — saxophone, accordion, synthesizers, trumpet, French horn, violin — and in endless styles that could at various times be at home in a conservatory, a church, a carnival or a roadhouse.

He was the one who set up, installed and maintained the recording equipment in the pink ranch house in Saugerties, N.Y., where Bob Dylan and the Band recorded more than 100 songs that came to be known as the basement tapes.

When the Band became a force on its own, he arranged the music on the group’s albums and painstakingly tweaked and honed its recordings. He added brass, woodwinds and eclectic flourishes that accentuated the group’s homespun authenticity, a quality that set it apart from the psychedelia and youthful posturing of the rock of its era.

During its peak, the Band was famously a collaborative operation informed by the songwriting and barbed guitar playing of Robbie Robertson and the soulful singing and musicianship of Levon Helm, Rick Danko and Richard Manuel. But critics and his fellow band members agreed that Mr. Hudson played an essential role in raising the group to another level entirely.

Eric Garth Hudson was born on Aug. 2, 1937, in Windsor, Ontario. His mother, Olive Louella Pentland, played piano and accordion and sang. His father, Fred James Hudson, was a farm inspector, who played drums, C melody saxophone, clarinet flute and piano. The family moved to London, Ontario, when Garth was about 3.

He grew up listening to county hoedowns on the radio, learning Bach preludes and fugues and studying music theory, harmony and counterpoint. He first played in public at St. Luke’s Anglican Church and at an uncle’s funeral home, then began a musical career that took him, from 1961 to 1963, to Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, a boisterous rockabilly and rhythm-and-blues band that included the other four members of what would become the Band, three of them Canadians. Mr. Helm was from Arkansas.