Smith - The Weight

from EASY RIDER

"The Weight" is the title of a 1968 song by The Band. It is one of the group's best known songs and among the most popular songs of the late 1960s counterculture.

The Band's version is an excellent example of a silent title record, one in which the title never appears in the lyrics. While the names of the five members of The Band appear on the record label, "The Band" does not.

The song was composed by The Band's Robbie Robertson and appears originally on The Band's first album, Music from Big Pink.
It is #41 in Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list.

"The Weight" takes the folk music motif of a traveler, who arrives in Nazareth in the Lehigh Valley region of Pennsylvania. Once there, he encounters various residents of the town, the song being a story of these encounters.

The traveler refers to "Miss Fannie," who has sent him on his journey to Nazareth, and "the weight" of the song is a reference to the burden of travel, of giving a message to the town, and of sin.

The chorus refers to taking a load off of Fannie and putting it on the singer. The numerous Biblical allusions in the character names and incidents in the song are allegorical, referring to a purgatorial experience.

In Levon Helm's autobiography "This Wheel's on Fire," Helm explains that the people mentioned in the song were based on real people the Band knew.

According to Robbie Robertson, "The Weight" was somewhat inspired by the films of Luis Buñuel, about which Robertson once said:

He did so many films on the impossibility of sainthood, people trying to do good in Viridiana and Nazarín, and it's impossible to do good. In "The Weight" it's the same thing.

The song was also included on the Easy Rider Soundtrack, but was performed by the band Smith because of contractual problems preventing use of The Band's version.

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