"He was my bosom buddy friend to the end, one of the last true great spirits of my or any other generation."

"This is just so sad to talk about. I still can remember the first day I met him and the last day I saw him. We go back pretty far and had been through some trials together. I'm going to miss him, as I'm sure a whole lot of others will too."

Bob Dylan, on the death of Levon Helm.

From a list of links at that link, I see that Rolling Stone once rated Levon Helm the 91st greatest singer of all time. From the explanation why:

Since Papa Garth Hudson didn't really sing, I always felt that, vocally, Levon was the father figure in the Band. He always seems strong and confident, like a father calling you home, or sometimes scolding you. The beauty in Richard Manuel's singing was often the sense of pain and darkness he conveyed. Rick Danko had a lot of melancholy to his voice as well, but he could also be a little more goofy. They were all different shades of color in the crayon box, and Levon's voice is the equivalent of a sturdy old farmhouse that has stood for years in the fields, weathering all kinds of change yet remaining unmovable.

I don't follow the bands today. Do they still have bands where different singers sing differently?

"Levon Helm, who helped to forge a deep-rooted American music as the drummer and singer for the Band..."

"... died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 71 and lived in Woodstock, N.Y."

Mr. Helm gave his drums a muffled, bottom-heavy sound that placed them in the foundation of the arrangements, and his tom-toms were tuned so that their pitch would bend downward as the tone faded. Mr. Helm didn’t call attention to himself. Three bass-drum thumps at the start of one of the Band’s anthems, “The Weight,” were all that he needed to establish the song’s gravity.

Beautiful. So sorry to lose this man.