Robbie Robertson: A Hawk Flies South, Chapter 2 of 4: "Southbound"

A rock icon tells the story, in four chapters, of how a 1950s street punk from Toronto turned himself into a guitar genius and master songwriter. Here's Chapter Two, "Southbound."

The man who taught Robbie Robertson how to rock and roll never achieved anything like Robbie’s success. None of Ronnie Hawkins’s singles or albums made the Top 10, or Top 20, on America’s pop charts; his highest-charting single, “Mary Lou,” made it only as far as #26 in 1959. Paradoxically, it was in Canada that this son of the South achieved the popularity that eluded him in the USA.

Hawkins was born in Huntsville, Arkansas in 1935 and raised in nearby Fayetteville. His mother was a teacher. “But his father…. Jasper Newton Hawkins was no teacher. He was a barber. A dangerous barber. He was a drunk. He nearly cut somebody’s ear off one time. There was all these Jasper Newton stories.”

Ronnie Hawkins was a first-generation rock & roller, raised on rockabilly, the blend of country and rhythm & blues that lit the whole world ablaze in the mid-to-late 1950s: the sound of the young Elvis, of Ronnie Hawkins’s own cousin Dale, who hit big with “Suzie Q”; of Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Eddie Cochran, and Harold Jenkins, who changed his name to Conway Twitty and ditched rockabilly for country. No sooner had Ronnie heard that they were crazy about rockabilly up in Canada than he was northward bound. Ronnie Hawkins and his Hawks did well, very well, in Ontario, scoring plenty of hit singles and albums. Ronnie opened his own club, the Hawk’s Nest, on Yonge Street, the heart of Toronto’s party district, and hosted rock & roll and rhythm & blues’s biggest names.

Say cheese, everybody. A teenaged Robbie Robertson and his Hawks bandmate Levon Helm stand behind their boss, Ronnie Hawkins.

Robbie wails on his Fender Telecaster as a goateed Ronnie Hawkins (trying on the day’s beatnik look) looks on approvingly. “My job was to make this work,” says Robbie. People thought Hawkins was crazy to hire an untested 16-year-old as his lead guitarist, and Robbie’s mission was to prove them wrong.

Ronnie could croon a folky Gordon Lighfoot ballad with the best of them (his third album was titled Folk Ballads of Ronnie Hawkins), but was most comfortable creating mayhem, a rockabilly tummler whose moves included back flips, leaps into the audience, and his camel walk, a progenitor of Michael Jackson’s moonwalk. “When the Hawk took the stage,” writes Robertson in Testimony, “you could taste something raw and authentic in the air. It was the most violent, dynamic, primitive rock ‘n’ roll I had ever witnessed, and it was addictive.” Holding everything together, says Robbie, “was a young beam of light on drums”: Levon Helm, who was to play a major, perhaps the major, role in Robbie’s life for the next fifteen years.¹