Ronnie Hawkins

Hawkins was born on January 10, 1935, in Huntsville, Arkansas, the son of Flora ( Cornett), a schoolteacher, and Jasper Hawkins, a barber. In 1945, the family, which included Hawkins's older sister Winifred, moved to Fayetteville, where Hawkins was educated in the city's public schools, graduating from Fayetteville High School in 1952. Musicianship ran in Hawkins's family; Hawkins's father, uncles, and cousins had toured the honky-tonk circuit in Arkansas and Oklahoma in the 1930s and 1940s. His uncle Delmar "Skipper" Hawkins, a road musician, had moved to California around 1940 and joined cowboy singing star Roy Rogers's band, the Sons of the Pioneers. Hawkins' cousin, Dale Hawkins, the earliest white performer to sing at the Apollo Theater in Harlem and the Regal Theater in Chicago, recorded the rhythm and blues song "Suzie Q" in 1957. Beginning at age 11, Ronnie Hawkins sang at local fairs and before he was a teenager shared a stage with Hank Williams. He recalled that Williams was too drunk to perform, and his band, the Drifting Cowboys, invited members of the audience to get on the stage and sing. Hawkins accepted the invitation and sang some Burl Ives songs he knew. As a teenager, Hawkins ran bootleg liquor from Missouri to the dry counties of Oklahoma in his modified Ford Model A, sometimes making $300 a day. He claimed in later years that he continued the activity until he was 19 or 20, and that it was how he made the money to buy into nightclubs. He had already formed his first band, the Hawks, when he graduated from high school in 1952, following which he studied physical education at the University of Arkansas, where in 1956 he dropped out just a few credits short of graduation. Hawkins then enlisted in the United States Army, but he was required to serve only six months, having already completed ROTC training. Soon after his arrival at Fort Sill in Oklahoma for Army Basic Combat Training, he was having a drink at the Amvets club when an African American quartet began to play their music. Hearing the first notes so stirred him that he jumped onto the stage and started singing. "It sounded like something between the blues and rockabilly ... me being a hayseed and those guys playing a lot funkier." as many white people in the American South of the 1950s could not accept an integrated band and considered rock 'n' roll and rhythm and blues the devil's music. With Helm's graduation from high school, he joined the Hawks and they went to Canada, where the group was successful. On April 13, 1959, they auditioned for Morris Levy, owner of Roulette Records in New York. Only four hours later, the band entered the studio and recorded their first tracks. The band's first single, "Forty Days", was a barely disguised derivative of Chuck Berry's "Thirty Days" with the song "Mary Lou" by Young Jessie on the B-side; it reached number 26 on the US pop charts, becoming Hawkins's biggest hit. ==Career==

Hawkins and the group had begun touring Canada in 1958 as the Ron Hawkins Quartet on the recommendation of Conway Twitty, who told him Canadian audiences wanted to hear rockabilly. Their bassist George Paulman was abusing liquor and pills, so Hawkins left him behind, and the band played without a bass on their first tour of Ontario. Their first gig was at the Golden Rail Tavern in Hamilton, Ontario, where according to booking agent Harold Kudlets all the bartenders quit when they heard the band's sound and saw Hawkins's stunts on stage. When he first came to Ontario, Hawkins performed at places like the Grange Tavern in Hamilton, where Conway Twitty got his start, and made it his home base. In Toronto, where the Hawks dominated the local scene, Hawkins opened his own night club, the Hawk's Nest, on the second floor of Le Coq d'Or Tavern on Yonge street, playing there for months at a time. It was also the first time he saw Levon Helm, whom he described as a "young beam of light on drums" at the center of it all. The Hawks were playing at Le Coq d'Or for a few more weeks, and Robertson hung around them as much as possible, hoping he could absorb some of their southern "mojo". to audition for a job with the Hawks, "the most wicked rock 'n' roll band around". Levon Helm met Robertson at the Greyhound bus station and initiated him into the ways of the Deep South. This was Robertson's first time in the South, and he was hoping to take the place of Fred Carter, Jr., who had played with Hawkins's cousin, Dale Hawkins, and Roy Orbison. The band went to Helm's home town of Helena in the Mississippi Delta, where Robertson spent some time at Helm's family farm. Helm and Robertson returned to the Rainbow Inn, a local motel in which Hawkins had ensconced the band, and practiced songs from the Hawks' repertoire. The motel was owned by a local ferry operator, Charlie Halbert, who had helped many musicians just starting out in the business, including Conway Twitty and Elvis Presley. When Hawkins offered him the job, Robertson asked how much he would be paid, and Hawkins responded, "Well, son, you won't make much money, but you'll get more pussy than Frank Sinatra." Hawkins, with Helm in tow, then went to England to promote his new record, where they met Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent, who were on tour there. Meanwhile, still at the Rainbow Inn, Robertson tried to learn as much of the band's repertoire as he could, in an environment that he recalled as "rockabilly boot camp". Before leaving for England, Hawkins took Robertson to the Delta Supper Club, a notorious hangout in West Helena, where an irate patron had chainsawed the bar down the middle. His haul of music included records by Ray Charles, bluesmen Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, B. B. King, Junior Parker, and T-Bone Walker, rockabilly singer and guitarist Warren Smith, and gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. Along with Helm, all the Hawks left Hawkins in 1964 to form a group which came to be named the Band. The decision came after Hawkins tried to prevent Rick Danko's girlfriend from coming to the group's shows. Hawkins wanted the group to mingle with the crowd, and Danko wanted to sit with her instead. Other issues included diverging musical interests and pay. Hawkins was often absent from shows, leaving the Hawks to play without him. Levon felt they should be paid more when Hawkins didn't show up. There was a confrontation and things came to a head. They went to work for Bob Dylan in 1965, touring with him for a year, and were his backup band on The Basement Tapes. Hawkins continued to perform and record, and did a few tours in Europe. Lennon also did a radio promo for a Hawkins single, a version of The Clovers song "Down in the Alley". Hawkins later rode with them on a train to Ottawa to see then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau. Lennon also enlisted Hawkins as a peace ambassador, and Hawkins traveled to the border of China and Hong Kong with journalist Ritchie Yorke bearing an anti-war message. In 1970 Hawkins recorded at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, laying down tracks for an ultimately unproduced album entitled Ronnie Hawkins. Among the studio musicians was Duane Allman, whose backing led two tracks from the session to be included on the Duane Allman An Anthology Volume II, released in 1974: Carl Perkins' rockabilly hit Matchbox, and the Don Gibson country & western tune ''Don't Tell Me Your Troubles, featuring Allman on dobro. Four other tracks from that album were also included on Skydog'', a 2016 Duane Allman retrospective: "One More Night," "Will the Circle Be Unbroken," "Down in the Alley," and "Who Do You Love". In the early 1970s, Hawkins noticed guitarist Pat Travers performing in Ontario nightclubs and was so impressed by the young musician that he invited him to play in his band. Travers joined the group, but balked when Hawkins told him he wanted him to play "old '50s and '60s rockabilly tunes". Years later, Travers told an interviewer, "he wanted me to play them exactly the same, same sound, same picking, same everything. For a 19-, 20-year-old kid, that wasn't exactly what I wanted to do. But he said, 'You can do this, son, and you'll be better than a hundred guitar players, because this is where it all comes from. You need to know this stuff. It's like fundamental.' And he was right." Travers later had a successful recording career and became an influential guitarist in the 1970s hard rock genre. In 1975, Bob Dylan cast Hawkins to play the role of "Bob Dylan" in the movie, Renaldo and Clara. The following year, he was a featured performer at the Band's Thanksgiving Day farewell concert at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, which was documented in the 1978 film The Last Waltz. Robbie Robertson said of it in 2020, "If there was anything wrong that night, it was that the cocaine wasn't very good." Hawkins sampled some of the powder and told the other performers that there was so much flour and sugar in it that they would be "sneezing biscuits" for three months afterward. Hawkin's 1984 LP, Making It Again, garnered him a Juno Award as Canada's best Country Male Vocalist. In addition to his career as a musician, he become an accomplished actor, hosting his own television show Honky Tonk in the early 1980s and appearing in such films as Michael Cimino's ''Heaven's Gate alongside his friend Kris Kristofferson, in the action/adventure film Snake Eater, and the ski comedy Copper Mountain starring Alan Thicke and a young Jim Carrey. His version of the song "Mary Lou" was used in the 1989 slasher film, Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II''. On January 10, 1995, Hawkins celebrated his 60th birthday by sponsoring a concert at Massey Hall in Toronto, which was documented on the album Let It Rock. The concert featured performances by Hawkins, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, The Band, Hawkins's band, the Hawks, or permutations of it, backed the performers. All of the musicians performing that night were collectively dubbed "the Rock 'n' Roll Orchestra". ==Later life==

In 2002, Hawkins was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer which went into remission, which he attributed in a documentary to a miracle by the 'Big Rocker' and Adam 'Dreamhealer' McLeod, a 16 year old healer from Vancouver. His remission was featured in the 2012 film Ronnie Hawkins: Still Alive and Kicking. In 2017, he moved from Stoney Lake Manor in Douro-Dummer, where he had resided since 1970, to Peterborough, Ontario. ==Death==

Hawkins died in the early morning of May 29, 2022, at the age of 87. His family said he had been quite ill but gave no specific cause. He is survived by his wife of 60 years, Wanda, their two sons, Ronnie Hawkins Jr. and singer-songwriter Robin Hawkins, who had served as his guitarist since the 1980s and wrote the hit song "Can't Stop Rockin'", and daughter Leah Hawkins, a singer-songwriter who had been his backup singer, and his grandchildren, Robin's four children, Tara, Troy, Jacob and Zack. ==Discography==

In 2002, October 4 was declared "Ronnie Hawkins Day" by the city of Toronto as he was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame, in recognition of his lifetime contribution to music and his generous support of the Schizophrenia Society of Ontario and other charitable organizations. and a Special Achievement Award from the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers (SOCAN) in 2007. ==References==