"They brought us in touch with the place where we all had to live," Greil Marcus wrote in Mystery Train. Thirty years after The Band's first appearance on the international music-scene toward the end of the 1960s, Marcus' words still ring true. More than that of any other group, The Band's work represents America at its sincerest, the diversity of its musical heritage, the vividness of its culture, and the lasting attraction of its history. Marcus noted that "against the instant America of the sixties they looked for the traditions that made new things not only possible, but valuable; against a flight from roots they set a sense of place. Against the pop scene, all flux and novelty, they set themselves: a band with years behind it, and meant to last." Last they certainly did.

The Band

Having started off as backing musicians (The Hawks) to...