Catching Up With... Amy Helm

[Above, L-R: Amy Helm, Levon Helm, Larry Campbell, Theresa Williams]

Last fall, Levon Helm, drummer and singer for The Band, released his first studio album in 25 years. Recorded in his barn studio in Woodstock, N.Y., the Grammy-nominated Dirt Farmer is a stirring collection of old family songs Helm learned growing up in rural Arkansas mixed with covers of songs by Steve Earle, Buddy Miller, and Paul Kennerley. The album on its on right is an accomplishment, but the story behind it—the tragedies and hardships overcome—could be the stuff of rock legend. Ten years ago, Helm was diagnosed with throat cancer and underwent harsh chemotherapy treatments that robbed him of his voice. While still recovering, his home studio burned, he declared bankruptcy and former Bandmate Rick Danko passed away unexpectedly in his sleep.

Gradually, Helm has made a strong comeback, first with his Midnight Ramble sessions—which are casual, late-night jams with friends and family—then with a large and lively touring band, and finally with Dirt Farmer. From its tracklist to its dedication to Helm’s parents, the album is, naturally, a family affair: He recorded the songs with long-time friends Larry Campbell and Teresa Williams as well as with his daughter, Amy Helm, a founding member of the roots-gospel act Ollabelle. Paste spoke with Amy Helm while she was driving around New York, hiding her cell phone from passing cops.

Paste: What was your role in producing the album?
Helm: I co-produced the album with Larry Campbell, and I really wanted the record to be a real platform for [Levon’s] vocals and his story and for his history to really shine. And to keep it as simple as possible. And acoustic. Larry shared the same vision, and we began to take it one day at a time with recording. We would do a handful of songs one day and then a week would go by, and we’d get together for a couple of days and try some other song. My father kept bringing songs into the fold that really rounded out the album and allowed the vision to complete itself.

As a daughter, I don’t know. We were all working together. You know, when you’re working on a project, you just get into that headspace. I knew how important it was to have these songs recorded that he had learned from his parents—from my grandparents. In that regard, I think I was very conscious of wanting to preserve those songs and record them so that they could be passed along and shared. And I’d say that’s pretty much how it all felt to me, the process of it.

Paste: How did you come across some of these songs?
Helm: Well, my dad had been taught a lot of songs. Both his parents played music. His father—my papaw—played guitar and sang at dances, and my mamaw was a strong alto church singer. That was just something that they did. A lot of the songs on the record, including “Little Birds,” “The Blind Child,” “The Girl I Left Behind” and “Poor Old Dirt Farmer,” were songs that they would sing when they were growing up. I had learned a couple of them before the album; I’d heard him sing a few of them before, and he taught me a few. But actually, as we’d begun the process of recording, a lot of songs came back to him. And lyrics came back. “Blind Child” is a good example. He called me one morning and said, ‘I dreamed the whole thing. I got it. I got the second verse, and I got the third verse. I remembered all of it.’ It would just come back to him almost in daydreams because we were starting to really get into the idea... He was thinking a lot about his parents and thinking a lot about those songs. That was pretty cool, to watch him resurrect them.

Paste: How did you come across some of the newer songs by Steve Earle (“The Mountain”) and Buddy Miller (“Wide River to Cross”)?
Helm: The Steve Earle song he had heard on television and just fell in love with it. And he had been talking about if for months. He didn’t have a copy of it, so we got a copy and we all listened to it about two or three times and had some ideas to change the time signature and fool around with it. And then we went right in and cut it. I think a lot of that was his stuff like [covering that song] was his idea.

He had been talking about wanting to do a Stanley Brothers song a lot, so we had been kicking around a lot of songs, and then Larry Campbell had the idea of doing “False Hearted Lover” with that particular train beat behind it, which I think is so strong. And the Paul Kennerley song. A lot of these songs, much like the ones from his childhood, were songs that he just loved singing and loved teaching people, songs that had always been around and had always been part of his repertoire of just jamming and just sitting around and playing music. I think a lot of it was stuff that he had had in mind for a long time to cut.

Paste: It sounds like a very casual recording session.
Helm: Yeah, it was. We didn’t have it structured. Either he came in with a song idea or Larry did, or, on occasion, I did. And we would just try it. We recorded lots. I think we recorded over 26 songs. We’d give it a shot, turn it around and try it a different way. Sometimes in the middle of recording one day, another song would come to mind and we would try that on the fly. It was very loose. We didn’t record for a chunk of time. We would find time when all of us could come up for a day, and then one of us would have to run out on the road or go do a show and we’d come back together three weeks later. It kind of went like that over the course of a year.