Woman made famous in Band song leads push to save Levon Helm’s home

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — “Young” Anna Lee Amsden, immortalized in The Band’s song The Weight, is kicking off an effort to restore Levon Helm’s childhood home and extend a musical heritage the drummer from Turkey Scratch, Ark., developed over 60 years.

The Levon Helm Legacy Project says it needs about $150,000 to preserve the greensided sharecropper's house, erect a bust of the performer nearby and introduce young people to the blues, folk and rock ’n’ roll traditions.

“One of the last things he said before he died was ‘Just keep it going,’” Amsden said in an interview Wednesday.

Helm died from throat cancer in 2012 at age 71 after spending his final years at Woodstock, N.Y., far from the cotton fields that surrounded his old home a few miles from the Mississippi River.

Characters from his youth populated his songs. In his vocals on the 1968 song The Weight, he sings: “Well, Luke, my friend, what about young Anna Lee? He said, ‘Do me a favour, son, won’t you stay and keep Anna Lee company.’”

“I don't think of him as a big movie star or a musical icon. I think of him of somebody that I love dearly who was a part of my family,” said Amsden, who is 76 and grew up along another country road near Turkey Scratch. “The fact that he left Phillips County and made out as well as he did — people would come to his rambles and be just in awe of playing with him — he needs to be immortalized.”

Helm is noted for his work as a drummer and a singer for The Band, though he also played Loretta Lynn’s father in Coal Miner’s Daughter and Capt. Jack Ridley in The Right Stuff. His final two solo albums each won a Grammy.

Tributes already are underway. Contributions are rolling in to a GoFundMe site set up for the Levon Helm Memorial in Marvell. Legislators this year designated a portion of U.S. 49 as the Levon Helm Memorial Highway.