Robbie Robertson didn’t make Americana. He made North American music.

He had an almost Whitmanesque compulsion to put the whole kaleidoscope on wax — conquest and colonialism, grief and good times. He sang the body and guitar electric. Life was a carnival and Robertson was a carny, literally in his teenage years, then later as a producer/actor in the 1980 movie “Carny,” and always, always in the music, which celebrated and mourned his newfound land, sometimes in the same breath.

If you look at the long arc of the life, Robertson was the rare rocker to carry the music forward by taking his listeners and himself backward in time. Growing up in Toronto and the Six Nations reservation about an hour’s drive away — his mother was Mohawk and Cayuga — he first heard mainstream post-WWII pop singers like Patti Page and Gogi Grant, then was thunderstruck by the blues, R&B and nascent rock ‘n’ roll he dialed in from Buffalo, and distant, mythological Nashville. The kid was ambitious, bearding Buddy Holly after a local concert to ask how he got that guitar sound. At 16, he stepped off a bus in Fayetteville, Ark., into what he said in a 1975 interview felt like “the Twilight Zone … It blew the top of my head off: Everything was different.”

Those fresh Canadian eyes took in the sounds and sensibilities of the American South and started absorbing them into the atlas in his head. He’d come south to audition as a bassist for rockabilly artist Ronnie Hawkins, who was touring in England when Robertson arrived; waiting for him to return, the kid hunkered down with a stack of Chicago blues and Mahalia Jackson records and honed his skills. Within a year, he was the Hawkins band’s lead guitarist.

It was already The Band, even if no one was calling them anything other than the Hawks. But Robertson’s friendship with Arkansas-born drummer Levon Helm ran soul deep, and the other Ontario musicians Hawkins had picked up by 1961 included Rick Danko, Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson. They went out on their own in 1964 as Levon and the Hawks, and a year later hooked up with Bob Dylan as his backing group on tour and in various configurations in the studio. Dylan was at the amphetamine apex of his fame, and by the time the group cut their first two albums, 1968’s “Music from Big Pink” and 1969’s “The Band,” they had a new name. The Band. It was knowingly generic and also a counterculture in-joke, Bob’s band being, of course, the only band that mattered.

But the songs, written mostly by Robertson and sung by Helm, Manuel and Danko, were unlike anything on the AM or FM dial — older, wiser, sadder and friskier, with bones that went back to a time before electricity. Parables like “The Weight,” which straddled the Bible and the tall tale, and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” which sounded like it really was sung by a defeated Confederate soldier in 1865. “King Harvest (Has Surely Come),” a busted Depression-era farmer’s lament; “Up on Cripple Creek,” a truck driver coming home to Bessie in “Lake Charles, Looozeyana.”

You can hear the seeds of these songs, playful, slapdash and acoustic, in “The Basement Tapes,” recorded in 1967 and only officially released eight years later: the Band and a recuperating Dylan holed up in the Saugerties, N.Y., house they dubbed Big Pink making music that Robertson later said “nobody was supposed to hear.” But everybody did, one way or another, and it connected a reeling nation with a past that felt anchored in ancient, honest soil. “The Band,” wrote critic Ed Ward in “The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll,” “helped a lot of people dizzy from the confusion and disorientation of the Sixties feel that the nation was big enough to include them, too.”

In Robertson’s own recollections, you can hear the cornucopia of music that was coursing through the group, but also a cinematic sensibility. “Everybody else was getting louder and we’re going to this other place,” he told Mojo magazine in 2017. “All of these musicalities we heard — fife-and-drum blues, mountain music, Delta, Anglican choirs, rockabilly, Johnny Cash — the simplicity is exquisite. The Staple Singers when they sang gospel and it’s just the voices and Roebuck’s guitar … Curtis Mayfield. And jazz — Charles Lloyd. All of this we’re gathering and all of it makes this new music …. It was cinematic … The more we got lost in that movie, Big Pink, the more comfortable it felt.”

That connection would flower when Robertson met director Martin Scorsese on the set of 1978’s “The Last Waltz” and inaugurated a film/music partnership that extended over 14 movies, including the score for Scorsese’s upcoming “Killers of the Flower Moon.” But in his subsequent solo career, Robertson pushed his musical exploration even further into the land’s and his personal history’s past.

“Music for the Native Americans” (1994), written to accompany a six-hour TBS documentary and recorded with a group of musicians dubbed the Red Road Ensemble, was steeped in Indigenous rhythms modernized toward pop, and “Contact from the Underworld of Redboy” (1998) — its title an allusion to a racist epithet Robertson was called as a child — is even more startling. That album is a fusion of Native American chant, rap, electronic music, R&B, rock ’n’ roll and snippets of an interview with imprisoned Native American activist Leonard Peltier that knits one’s man’s musical and life journey into a blanket where all the threads are connected to each other and none stands alone.

Said Robertson at the time of the album’s release, “It’s hard to believe that this would be the most obscure music in all of North America at the same time [it’s] the original music of North America.”

That’s the sound of a man who followed a trail all the way back to its beginnings and somehow managed to forge a new path. It’s a long way from Toronto to the American South, to the top of the charts and a Hollywood soundstage, and back to the Six Nations and a continent’s buried history. It’s also a way of coming home. We’re blessed that Robbie Robertson brought us with him on the journey.

Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr’s Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.substack.com.