Ronnie Hawkins, Rockabilly Legend Who Mentored Rock’s Greatest, Dead at 87

Ronnie Hawkins, the Canadian rockabilly singer known as “the Hawk,” who mentored the Band and played with rock’s greats, died Sunday morning. He was 87.

“He went peacefully and he looked as handsome as ever,” Wanda Hawkins, his wife, told the Canadian Press. A cause of death was not immediately available.

Despite being born in Arkansas, Hawkins called Canada home for most of his career and was considered a formative influence on the evolution of the country’s rock scene thanks to his passion for blues music.

Five members of his group the Hawks – Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, and Richard Manuel – played with Hawkins in the late 1950s and early 1960s before dropping out in 1963 before eventually forming The Band a few years later. After Hawkins, the Hawks’ next lead singer would be Bob Dylan.

“We should thank Ronnie Hawkins in being so instrumental in us coming together and for teaching us the ‘code of the road,’ so to speak,” Robertson said during the group’s 1994 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction speech.

Hawkins famously joined the group in Martin Scorsese’s 1978 classic The Last Waltz.

Always more a live dynamo than a studio musician, Hawkins scored hits with rollicking covers of Bo Diddley’s “Who Do You Love?” and Chuck Berry’s “Thirty Days” (Hawkins titled his cover “Forty Days.”)

Unlike many of his musical peers, Hawkins never returned to the U.S. full time (though he retained his citizenship). His love for his chosen homeland was one of the cornerstones of his reputation. Hawkins was awarded a number of prestigious Canadian music awards throughout his career, including a Juno Award for country male vocalist of the year in 1982 and lifetime achievement awards from the Junos (1996) and the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN) in 2007.

Perhaps because of his dual citizenship and his big personality, Hawkins was a natural at bringing together disparate genres and musicians. As the CBC notes, he recorded with everyone from Duane Allman to The Happy Hooker author Xaviera Hollander and played Bob Dylan in Dylan’s 1978 flop Renaldo and Clara.

“If the world had more people like Ronnie Hawkins, we’d do less stupid things to each other, we’d hurt fewer people, we’d have a lot more laughs,” Bill Clinton said in the 2004 documentary Hawkins: Still Alive and Kickin’. “I’ve never met another one like him.”