Ronnie Hawkins, who combined the gregarious stage presence of a natural showman and a commitment to turbocharged rockabilly music in a rowdy career that spanned more than a half-century, died on Sunday. He was 87.
His daughter Leah confirmed his death. She did not say where he died or disclose the cause, though she said he had been quite ill.
Mr. Hawkins started performing in his native Arkansas in the late 1950s and became a roadhouse entertainer based in Canada in the 1960s, his music forever rooted in the primal rock ’n’ roll rhythms of Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry.
For all of his success, his biggest claim to fame was not the music he produced but the musicians he attracted and mentored. His backup musicians of the early 1960s, Levon Helm, Robbie Robertson, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel and Rick Danko, went on to form the Band, which backed Bob Dylan and became one of the most admired and influential bands in rock history.
But those musicians, like many of Mr. Hawkins’s fans, never lost their reverence for the man known as the Hawk.
“Ronnie’s whole style,” Mr. Robertson once said, was for him and his band to play “faster and more violent and explosive than anyone had ever heard before.”
Ronald Cornett Hawkins was born on Jan. 10, 1935, two days after Elvis Presley, in Huntsville, Ark. When he was 9, his family moved to nearby Fayetteville, where his father, Jasper, opened a barbershop and his mother, Flora, taught school. His musical education began at the barbershop where a shoeshine boy named Buddy Hayes had a blues band that rehearsed with a piano player named Little Joe.
It was there that he began to imbibe the crazy quilt music of the South, with blues and jazz filtered through snatches of country and the minstrel and medicine shows that traveled through town. Before long, something new was added: the beginnings of rock ’n’ roll, which was percolating out of Sam Phillips’s Sun Records studio in Memphis.
Mr. Hawkins brought to all that an…