Around the World and Back to Arkansas: New Levon Helm exhibit
Until recently, a set of drums that longtime local musician and festival...
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Until recently, a set of drums that longtime local musician and festival founder Bryan Hembree describes as “the most important drum kit in American music” sat in a barn in Fayetteville, unused and largely forgotten.
The setup is a personalized kit assembled in the early 1960s and considered to be the “No. 1” kit of Arkansan and Rock & Roll Hall of Fame member Levon Helm.
Like a guitarist who switches instruments between songs to obtain a different sound, Helm would play on a variety of kits throughout the years. But this one seemed to have special importance to Helm, and it was the one seen in many of the tours and concert events that made his group, called The Band, famous. It was the kit he played when The Band backed Bob Dylan on his first electrified tour. Those early concerts were composed of two sets – one of Dylan playing familiar acoustic music and the other backed by the full heft of The Band behind him.
In his memoir “This Wheel’s on Fire,” Helm said the boos the group received from angry fans who wanted Dylan to remain a folk singer forced him to quit the tour. Helm worked for a while in the oil industry.
But he returned – with his No. 1 kit – for subsequent tours, and he also used it on The Band’s much-celebrated farewell concert, “The Last Waltz.” Turned into a concert film by Martin Scorsese, Helm can be seen playing the kit for the show.
The kit eventually made its way to Helm’s nephew, Terry Cagle, who, like Helm, was born in the Arkansas delta and played drums. Cagle, who joined the Springdale-based but nationally known group The Cate Brothers Band, died in 2023. A collection of Helm’s instruments and ephemera was then passed down to Cagle’s son, Wade, a Fayetteville resident.
After Terry Cagle’s passing, the family wanted to find a way to publicly display many of those items. Helm’s daughter, Amy Helm, had played at the Fayetteville Roots Festival, which Hembree co-founded with his wife, Bernice Hembree, and local restaurant owner Jerrmy Gawthrop.
Photo: Courtesy, Walton Arts Center
Amy Helm asked Hembree to take a look at the items and see what was there.
“I was kind of astonished to see what he had,” Hembree said, who has recently moved from Fayetteville to the U.K. to attend graduate school.
Piecing together the provenance of the items by watching YouTube clips of famous concerts by Dylan and The Band or The Band by itself, Hembree’s plan was to help the family uncover the instruments’ history.
Coincidentally, Deanna McCloud, a curator specializing in folk music, contacted Hembree about two weeks after he got his first look at Levon’s kit. She was interested in creating an exhibit about Helm for the Boston-based Folk Americana Roots Hall of Fame, housed in the Wang Theatre in Boston.
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