BEST OF THE BAND

Music / Songs / Ophelia

Ophelia

The lead single from Northern Lights–Southern Cross, and the clearest showcase on the record for just how far Garth Hudson's arranging had come by 1975. The song's bouncy, horn-driven arrangement sounds like a full New Orleans brass section at work, but there were no real horn players on the session at all: Hudson built the entire sound out of layered organ and synthesizer parts, an arrangement so complete that when Allen Toussaint later scored real horns for the same song at The Last Waltz, he barely changed what Hudson had already invented alone in the studio.

Levon Helm sings the lead, playing a narrator trying to track down a woman named Ophelia who's left town in a hurry, the nature of their relationship left deliberately unclear. Biographer Barney Hoskyns has said the name likely came not from Shakespeare's Hamlet but from the real name of country comedian Minnie Pearl, though some critics have still heard Shakespearean echoes in the song regardless. It reached the lower half of the Hot 100 as a single, modest by the standards of the group's late-1960s success, but became one of the most enduring songs of the group's second act, performed at The Last Waltz and covered by artists including My Morning Jacket and Vince Gill.

Notable versions