“The Weight,” by the Band’s Robbie Robertson, appears on their album Music from Big Pink (1968).

Robertson tells a story about a traveler’s visit to a small town, but mixes biblical references into the story to create a modern parable.

This song rose to #63—the album climbed to #30.

Robertson told Rock Cellar Magazine that this song was inspired by a surrealist filmmaker. He was thinking of Luis Buñuel: “I saw about three Buñuel movies and there was a thread running through these that fascinated me because it was all about people trying to do something really good. And you think, oh, that’s great, but it would turn on them just the way things in real life can do.”

Robertson sees this song as amusing. The laughs are subtle, though: “When I was writing the song it was entertaining me, just the lyrics that I was writing, the irony of that kind of thing. It is a song that has a certain humor to it, not an obvious humor but there is a humor inside all of that.”

Robertson was first able to grasp the Band’s vibe after recording two tracks. They were “Tears of Rage” and this song: “We recorded that and we recorded ‘The Weight’ as well and when I heard those two things, I thought, there it is as clear as it can be. That’s as true to our musical experience up to this point as possibly could be.”

Robertson believed in this song from the start. But he didn’t foresee it becoming as popular as it did: “I had thought, here’s a little tune, if some of these others don’t work out as well as expected I’ve got something to fall back on here. And I didn’t recognize at the time that it was real good. When you’re inside looking out sometimes you just can’t see it clearly. But it was definitely one of those songs.”

The first pressing of this single lists the artists as “Jaime Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, Garth Hudson, Levon Helm” as The Band hadn’t yet been named.

In 1969, Aretha Franklin covered this song—it rose to #19.