Ronald Cornett Hawkins OC[1] (January 10, 1935 – May 29, 2022) was an American rock and roll singer, long based in Canada, whose career spanned more than half a century.

Robbie Lane and the Disciples made their name opening for Ronnie Hawkins and The Hawks at the Yonge Street bars in Toronto,[4] and eventually became his backing band.

His uncle Delmar "Skipper" Hawkins, a road musician, had moved to California about 1940 and joined cowboy singing star Roy Rogers's band, the Sons of the Pioneers.

Beginning at age eleven, Ronnie Hawkins sang at local fairs and before he was a teenager shared a stage with Hank Williams.

[11] As a teenager, Hawkins ran bootleg liquor from Missouri to the dry counties of Oklahoma in his modified Ford Model A, sometimes making three hundred dollars a day.

Soon after his arrival at Fort Sill in Oklahoma for Army Basic Combat Training, he was having a drink at the Amvets club when an African American quartet began to play their music.

"[11] The experience caused Hawkins to realize what kind of music he really wanted to play, and he joined the four black musicians, who renamed themselves the Blackhawks.

Nevertheless, he took advantage of the opportunity to cut two demos, Lloyd Price's "Lawdy Miss Clawdy" and Hank Williams's "A Mansion on the Hill", but the recordings attracted no attention.

Drummer Levon Helm, who had grown up in nearby Turkey Scratch, Arkansas, first played with the group at the Delta Supper Club in early 1957 when George Paulman invited him to sit in them for their closing set.

Helm listened to Hawkins negotiate an agreement with his parents, who insisted that he graduate from high school before he could join The Hawks and go to Canada.

[11] Hawkins's live act included back flips and a "camel walk" that preceded Michael Jackson's similar moonwalk by three decades.

[9] Hawkins also owned and operated the Rockwood Club in Fayetteville, where some of rock and roll's earliest pioneers came to play, including Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison and Conway Twitty.

Their first gig was at the Golden Rail Tavern in Hamilton, Ontario, where, according to booking agent Harold Kudlets, all the bartenders quit when they heard the band's sound and saw Hawkins's stunts on stage.

David Clayton-Thomas, a Canadian and future lead vocalist of the American group Blood, Sweat & Tears, said he heard the Hawks when he got out of prison in 1962: "We young musicians would sit there by the bar at Le Coq d'Or and just hang on every note."

This version of the Hawks, wearing mohair suits and razor-cut hair, were the top group among those who played Le Coq d'Or, a rowdy establishment at the center of the action on the Yonge Street strip in Toronto.

[16] Robbie Robertson wrote in his 2016 memoir Testimony about how he and his band the Suedes had opened for the Hawks at the Dixie Arena in the west end of Toronto when he was fifteen.

Hoping to ingratiate himself, Robertson stayed up all night and wrote two songs, "Someone Like You and "Hey Boba Lu", and played them for Hawkins the next day.

[20][13] A year later, in 1960, Robertson pawned his prized 1957 Fender Stratocaster to buy a bus ticket south from Toronto to Fayetteville, Arkansas,[21] to audition for a job with Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, "the most wicked rock 'n' roll band around".

[23] Then he and Helm returned to the Rainbow Inn, a local motel in which Hawkins had ensconced the band, and practiced songs from the Hawks' repertoire.

The motel was owned by a local ferry operator, Charlie Halbert, who had helped many musicians just starting out in the business, including Conway Twitty and Elvis Presley.

[18][26] Before leaving on the trip to England, Hawkins took Robertson to the Delta Supper Club, a notorious hangout in West Helena, where an irate patron had chainsawed the bar down the middle.

[16] While waiting for Hawkins's and Helm's return, Robertson practiced, listening to stacks of records he had bought in Memphis with his first week's paycheck.

[18] When Hawkins and his new Hawks lineup recorded the album Mojo Man in New York City in 1961, Robertson's lead guitar work showed the influence of other Chicago bluesmen such as Buddy Guy and Otis Rush as well.

[15] In December 1969, Hawkins hosted John Lennon and Yoko Ono for a stay at his home in Mississauga, Ontario, during the couple's campaign to promote world peace.

In the early 1970s, Hawkins noticed guitarist Pat Travers performing in Ontario nightclubs and was so impressed by the young musician that he invited him to play in his band.

[36] The following year, he was a featured performer at the Band's Thanksgiving Day farewell concert at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, which was documented in the 1978 film The Last Waltz.

[43] In 2002, Hawkins was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer which went into remission, which he attributed in the film documentary to a miracle by the 'Big Rocker' and Adam 'Dreamhealer' McLeod, a 16 year old healer from Vancouver, B.C.

[50][1] In 2002, October 4 was declared "Ronnie Hawkins Day" by the city of Toronto as he was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame, in recognition of his lifetime contribution to music and his generous support of the Schizophrenia Society of Ontario and other charitable organizations.

The citation reads:For his contributions to the development of the music industry in Canada, as a rock and roll musician, and for his support of charitable causes.

In addition to producing scores of singles and albums, he has performed in support of many charitable causes, notably the Peterborough Flood Relief and the Schizophrenia Society of Ontario.