Tooze brings a man and a musical era to life.

Helm gets his due here—it’s about time—in a biography that spans his impoverished but richly lived rural Arkansas boyhood through his salad days with Ronnie Hawkins and then The Band, that group’s bitter dissolution, and Helm’s final, wonderfully redemptive solo albums.

[Tooze's] fresh investigation couldn’t come at a better time, seeing how Robertson’s version of events – set out in a recent autobiography, documentary, and what feels like daily media interviews – is currently the uncontested narrative.

This meticulously researched book offers music fans a thorough introduction and adds to current material, including Helm’s autobiography This Wheel’s on Fire, Barney Hoskyns’s Across the Great Divide, and the film Ain’t in It for My Health..

Tooze keeps a steady beat in a straightforward chronicle of the life of Band musician Levon Helm.

Tooze, previously a biographer of Helm’s hero, Muddy Waters, spins a story that is well known thanks to Helm’s own memoir This Wheel’s on Fire (1993) and band mate Robbie Robertson’s Testimony (2016). Tooze’s musical vocabulary is solid and her reconstruction of The Band’s chronology is accurate.