eJazzNews Archive

Robbie Robertson Receives Governor General’s Performing Arts Award (2006)

Originally published on eJazzNews · · By Cindy McLeod

On September 20, 2006, eJazzNews posted a Canadian music news item, submitted by Cindy McLeod of jazzelements.com, reporting that Robbie Robertson had been named a 2006 recipient of the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for lifetime artistic achievement in popular music. The awards were to be presented in Ottawa on November 3, 2006. Robertson, the guitarist and main songwriter of The Band, died in Los Angeles on August 9, 2023, at the age of 80.

What the 2006 report said

The item quoted the awards jury as calling Robertson “a living symbol of brilliant roots musicianship, spiritual insight and Canada’s multicultural character”; the awards foundation’s own profile of him reads “spiritual journey” at that point. It summarized his background as the son of a Mohawk mother and a Jewish father who grew up in Toronto and on the Six Nations reserve, and traced his career from the Hawks, the band behind rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins, to The Band: touring with Bob Dylan, playing Woodstock and recording Music from Big Pink (1968) and The Band (1969). It listed his film work with Martin Scorsese, from Raging Bull to The Departed, and noted that he had released four solo albums and was working on a Native North American Broadway musical.

The report also named the other 2006 honorees: broadcaster Jacques Languirand, theater actor and director Albert Millaire, dancer Joysanne Sidimus, CBC documentary maker Mark Starowicz and a comedy producer it called “Lorne Phillips.” That was Lorne Michaels, creator and executive producer of NBC’s Saturday Night Live, who is on the official list of 2006 laureates. Georges and Sherif Laoun received the Ramon John Hnatyshyn Award for Voluntarism, and Richard Bradshaw of the Canadian Opera Company the National Arts Centre Award. One more correction: the report dated The Last Waltz to 1976. The farewell concert took place that year, but Scorsese’s film of it came out in 1978.

Robertson’s roots and early career

Jaime Royal Robertson was born in Toronto on July 5, 1943. His mother, Rosemarie Chrysler, was of Mohawk and Cayuga descent and was raised on the Six Nations reserve, where her son spent time with family and learned guitar. As a boy he learned that his biological father was Alexander Klegerman, a professional gambler who had been killed in a road accident. He joined Hawkins’s Hawks around 1960, and the group, with Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson, backed Dylan on his 1965 and 1966 tours before becoming The Band.

The Governor General’s award has honored Canadian musicians since 1992; its earlier popular music laureates included the jazz pianists Oscar Peterson (1992) and Oliver Jones (2005), names familiar from lists of great jazz pianists.

What happened next

Robertson released two more solo albums, How to Become Clairvoyant in 2011 and Sinematic in 2019, published a memoir, Testimony, in 2016, and in 2019 his company produced Once Were Brothers, a documentary telling his side of The Band’s story. He kept working with Scorsese on films including The Wolf of Wall Street and The Irishman. He died after a long illness in August 2023, while working on the music for Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, a film about the Osage Nation. The score brought him a posthumous Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score in 2024.

Sources

This page is based on an article from the original eJazzNews archive (2001 to 2018), with background and sources added in 2026. The original text is not republished here. You can read the original as it appeared on eJazzNews via the Internet Archive.
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