Mr. Hudson continued to be sought after and widely admired, performing and recording with dozens of musicians, including Leonard Cohen, Tom Petty and Roger Waters, the Pink Floyd singer-songwriter and bassist.
For a group that captured so much of the depth and richness of the American experience, the lives of the Band’s members evoked much of its pain as well; several struggled with drugs, alcohol and financial ruin.
Mr. Manuel hanged himself at age 42 while on tour with the reunited Band in 1986. Mr. Danko, who struggled with heroin addiction and health issues related to it, died in his sleep at 56 in 1999. Mr. Helm, who overcame drug problems to become a beloved presence in Woodstock, died from complications of cancer in 2012 at age 71. And Mr. Robertson died of an unidentified illness in 2023 at 80.
Mr. Hudson suffered numerous financial setbacks, including several bankruptcies and a messy row with his landlord in Kingston, N.Y., who sold off much of Mr. Hudson’s personal property in 2013. Over the years his bushy black beard became a bushy white one, and he took on a stooped, genial, gnomelike presence around Woodstock, where he sometimes performed with his wife, the singer Sister Maud Hudson, who died in 2022 at 71. He left no immediate survivors.
Mr. Hudson mostly let his music speak for him. (One interviewer described his slow, careful manner of speech as “William Burroughs with long pauses.”) Still, his music and presence, captured in a video Rolling Stone made in 2014 when he returned to the basement of Big Pink for the first time since 1968, became the embodiment of a lost era when a little Catskills village became an international music mecca.
“Anybody who gets a chance to play with Garth Hudson, they’d be a fool not to,” Mr. Helm once said. “As far as the Band is concerned, he’s the one who rubbed off on the rest of us and made us sound as good as we did.”
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
