Levon Helm is most widely known for the songs he sang that found their way onto the pop charts during his long tenure as drummer and singer for the Band: “Up On Cripple Creek,” “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and “The Weight,” earthy and infectious conglomerations of gospel, country, blues, folk and rock music.

But the one that might crystallize his approach to music throughout his life was “The W.S. Walcott Medicine Show,” an ode to the kind of freewheeling gatherings in which the musician, who died of cancer Thursday at 71 in New York, thoroughly reveled.

Helm’s wife, Sandy, and daughter, Amy, posted a note on his website Tuesday alerting fans and friends that he was in the final stages of cancer.

Mark Lavon Helm was born May 26, 1940, in Elaine, Ark., according to his official website.

Still a teenager, he joined the backup band for fellow Arkansas singer Ronnie Hawkins.

The backup group included songwriter and guitarist Robbie Robertson, guitarist-keyboardist Richard Manuel, bassist Rick Danko and multi-instrumentalist Garth Hudson. For a time after they broke with Hawkins, they continued as Levon and the Hawks.

Bob Dylan heard and recruited the Hawks to be his band as he broadened his sound from the folk-rooted acoustic-guitar-and-harmonica sound to incorporate the visceral power of electric instrumentation that was at the heart of rock.

After a near-fatal motorcycle accident in 1966, Dylan went into seclusion at an upstate New York house, working with the members of the Hawks, recording dozens of songs released years later as “The Basement Tapes.”

Some of those songs surfaced when that group launched its own career, for which the members adopted the name The Band in a nod to its star-free ethos.

The Band took listeners back to the root strains that originally gave birth to rock. The timeless sound that resulted influenced hundreds of musicians who followed in its wake, and The Band almost single-handedly established the template for a genre that has come to be known as Americana music.

After having toured incessantly for 20 years, The Band called it quits in 1976 with perhaps the most famous sendoff concert ever, an all-star affair that director Martin Scorsese documented in the concert film “The Last Waltz.” Dylan, Neil Young, Van Morrison, Muddy Waters, Joni Mitchell, Eric Clapton, Neil Diamond and numerous others played at the San Francisco concert.