History / The Name Story

The Name Story

Short answer: they didn't pick it. Everybody around them already called them that, and eventually they gave up trying to call themselves anything else.

By 1967, the five musicians who'd spent a decade as the Hawks, then Levon and the Hawks, then simply Bob Dylan's backing group, had moved to Woodstock, New York, and stopped touring under any name at all. Around town, in shops, at the post office, among neighbors, people just referred to them as the band, meaning Dylan's band, since that was the only context anyone local had for five young men who kept turning up together. Robertson explained it plainly in a 1968 interview: there weren't many other bands around Woodstock, so their friends and neighbors just called them the band, and that was how they'd started thinking of themselves too.

That casual habit became a real problem once they needed an actual name for a record contract. They tried on a few options first. Richard Manuel later said they'd kicked around the Honkies and the Crackers, half-joking, self-mocking names that poked fun at their own Southern-inflected, roots-heavy sound. They even signed an early contract as the Crackers and performed under that name at a Woody Guthrie tribute concert at Carnegie Hall in January 1968. Capitol Records didn't want to release an album under either joke name. So they landed on the thing everyone already called them, dropped the "the" question entirely, and became, officially, the Band.

Robertson has told the story with a shrug more than once: their friends called them the Band, Dylan called them the Band, so did their neighbors, and after a while a name that started as nobody's idea in particular just stuck because nothing else fit. It's an unusually plain origin for a group whose songs were often anything but plain, and it's part of why, decades later, the name is still hard to search for online: "the Band" was never actually meant to sound like a proper noun.