Robbie Robertson — Lead Singer Of The Band — Dead At 80

LOS ANGELES — Robbie Robertson, lead guitarist and songwriter for The Band, died Wednesday in Los Angeles. He was 80.

Robertson died surrounded by family “after a long illness,” publicist Ray Costa said in a statement.

The Canadian-born musician was a high school dropout and one-man melting pot — part-Jewish, part-Mohawk and Cayuga — as well as a self-taught musicologist and storyteller.

Known first as Bob Dylan’s backing group and then as a standalone act, The Band influenced popular music of the 1960s and ’70s. Through the "Basement Tapes" they had made with Dylan in 1967 and through their own albums, they have been widely credited as a founding source for Americana — or roots music.

The group featured Arkansan drummer-singer Levon Helm and three other Canadians: bassist-singer-songwriter Rick Danko, keyboardist singer-songwriter Richard Manuel and multi-instrumentalist Garth Hudson. The Band played at the 1969 Woodstock festival and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.

In addition to his work with The Band, Robertson had a long career as a solo artist and soundtrack composer. His self-titled 1987 album was certified gold and featured the hit single "Show Down at Big Sky.” He helped oversee the soundtracks for numerous Martin Scorsese projects, including "The Color of Money," "The King of Comedy," "The Departed" "The Irishman" and the upcoming "Killers of the Flower Moon."

"Robbie Robertson was one of my closest friends, a constant in my life and my work,” Scorsese said in a prepared statement shared on social media by NBC News' Daniel Arkin. “I could always go to him as a confidante. A collaborator. An advisor. I tried to be the same for him.”

Robertson also produced the Neil Diamond album "Beautiful Noise.”

“The music world lost a great one with the passing of Robbie Robertson,” Diamond said in a social media post. “Keep making that Beautiful Noise in the sky, Robbie. I’ll miss you.”

Fellow Canadian Kiefer Sutherland also shared his condolences in a post online.

“The loss of Robbie Robertson is heartbreaking,” the actor said. “Canada has lost an icon, and music has lost a poet and a scholar.”

Jaime Royal Robertson was born in Toronto and spent summers at the Six Nations of the Grand River reserve where his mother Rosemarie Dolly Chrysler grew up. He never met his father, Alexander David Klegerman, who died before he was born and whose existence Robertson only learned of years later. His mother had since married a factory worker, James Robertson, whom Robbie Robertson at first believed was his biological parent.

Music was an escape from what he remembered as a violent and abusive household; his parents separated when he was in his early teens.

When he was 15, his group opened for Ronnie Hawkins at a club in Toronto. After overhearing Hawkins say he was in need of new material, Robertson hurried home, worked up a couple of songs and brought them over to his hotel. Hawkins recorded both of them and Robertson would soon find himself on a train to Hawkins' home base in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Over the next few years, he toured with Hawkins in the U.S. and Canada as members left and the performers who eventually became The Band were brought in. By 1963, Robertson and the others had grown apart from Hawkins and were ready to work on their own, recording a handful of singles as the Canadian Squires and stepping into rock history when mutual acquaintances suggested they should tour behind Dylan.

Robertson married the Canadian journalist Dominique Bourgeois in 1967. They had three children before divorcing. His other survivors include his second wife, Janet Zuccarini, and five grandchildren.

His family asked that donations in his memory be made to the Six Nations of the Grand River to support a new Woodland Cultural Centre.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.