It’s an honest voice, a beautiful road-tested voice, a glorious combination of coffee and wood smoke, maple syrup and moonshine.

You may have first heard it when you were driving your folk’s car on a summer night; an amazing sound came pouring out of your radio, and the voice sang, “I pulled into Nazareth, was a-feeling ’bout half past dead.” You were hooked. Since then, you’ve sung along with that voice a thousand times: “Baby don’t you do it, don’t do it, don’t you break my heart…When I get off-a this mountain, you know where I wanna go, straight down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico… Back with my wife in Tennessee, when one day she calls to me, Virgil quick come see, there goes the Robert E. Lee…”

That voice belongs to Levon Helm. He was born into a cotton-farming family in Turkey Scratch, Arkansas in 1940. At 17, he left home to tour with Ronnie Hawkins. He played on American Bandstand. He helped Bob Dylan go electric in 1965. But that was all a prelude to creating The Band, one of the most influential acts in rock history. Levon was The Band’s leader, drummer, mandolin player and primary singer, until their breakup in 1976.

But his voice was so great, rock and roll couldn’t contain it. In the film version of Coal Miner’s Daughter, Loretta Lynn’s father notices she’s pregnant and he says, in a pure southern drawl, “I believe married life is makin’ you fat, girl.” Yep, that was Levon, in one of his first acting roles. In The Right Stuff, Chuck Yeager complains that he can’t pull the canopy of his airplane closed on account of his broken ribs. Levon, playing Yeager’s mechanic, offers a down-home solution, “Here, stick this broomstick in the handle, take your good arm and whang it down.”

Levon’s voice even extended to the written page; his 1994 autobiography, “This Wheel’s on Fire,” is considered one of the best of its kind.

Through music, movies and books, Levon Helm’s voice became a national treasure. But, in a terrible irony, he was struck by throat cancer in 1998. A tumor was removed, and Levon endured 28 radiation treatments. With his voice weakened, he hosted legendary “midnight rambles” at his barn in Woodstock. Over time his voice strengthened, he took the rambles on the road, and released two successful albums. Things were looking up. But sadly, the cancer recently returned. This afternoon, in a hospital in New York, Levon Helm passed away at age 71.

The man is gone, but the magic of his voice remains in the stories he left behind. You might want to give him a thought today, and maybe take a listen to some of those stories. Go ahead, you know a lot of the lyrics by heart: “Ashes of laughter, the ghost is clear, why do the best things always disappear?… Life is a carnival, believe it or not, life is a carnival, two bits a shot…Catch a cannonball, now, to take me on down the line…”

That voice you’re hearing in your head is Levon Helm.