Members / Garth Hudson

Garth Hudson

Hudson was born Eric Garth Hudson in Windsor, Ontario, on August 2, 1937, to two musician parents, and he took music more formally than any of his future bandmates. He trained classically, planned on a career teaching it, and had zero interest in joining a bar band when the Hawks came calling. Getting him to say yes took actual negotiation. Hawkins agreed to pay him ten dollars a week, officially as a paid "music consultant" rather than a band member, so Hudson's parents could tell themselves their son was giving lessons, not playing rock and roll for a living. Hawkins also bought him a Lowrey organ, an instrument that ran something like sixteen thousand of today's dollars at the time. Hudson joined in December 1961, the last piece of the five-man lineup that would eventually become the Band.

He turned out to be the group's most technically accomplished musician by a wide margin, and its least conventional organ player. Where most rock organists of the era leaned on the Hammond, Hudson stuck with the stranger, more elastic sound of the Lowrey, and Keyboard magazine later called him "the most brilliant organist in the rock world." He also played piano, accordion, and the full family of saxophones, soprano through baritone, and functioned as something close to an uncredited arranger on the group's records, the member most responsible for the textures that made the Band's sound instantly recognizable.

After the group's 1976 breakup, Hudson became one of the most in-demand session musicians of his generation, appearing on records by Van Morrison, Leonard Cohen, Emmylou Harris, and Neko Case, among many others; Elton John has cited him as an early influence. He rejoined the reunited Band for its entire second run, from 1983 until Danko's death ended the group for good in 1999. In 2002 he joined Burrito Deluxe, a version of the Flying Burrito Brothers, and in 2005 formed his own twelve-piece group called the Best! with his wife, singer Maud Hudson. Their 2005 live album together, Live at the Wolf, and his 2010 project Garth Hudson Presents: A Canadian Celebration of the Band, which gathered Canadian artists including Neil Young and Bruce Cockburn to cover the group's catalog, kept him working well into his seventies.

Maud died on February 28, 2022. Hudson made his final public performance on April 16, 2023, in Kingston, New York. He died on January 21, 2025, in a Woodstock nursing home, at eighty-seven, the last of the five original members to go. With his death, the group that had spent six decades being written about, argued over, and covered by everyone from Aretha Franklin to Nazareth passed entirely into history.