Richard Manuel birthplace — Stratford, Ontario

Richard Manuel was born on April 3, 1943, in Stratford, Ontario — a market town on the Avon River in southwestern Ontario, best known as the home of the Stratford Festival, North America's largest classical repertory theatre. His father was a mechanic and his mother a schoolteacher, a stable middle-class background that gave him piano lessons and a Methodist church choir before he discovered rock and roll around 1957 and joined a local band called The Rebels. He left Stratford for Toronto in the early 1960s, where he was recruited by Ronnie Hawkins and eventually joined the group of musicians that would become The Band.

Manuel was The Band's primary pianist and one of their most affecting vocalists — a singer of extraordinary emotional directness whose voice, pitched somewhere between a cry and a plea, gave songs like 'The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down', 'Whispering Pines', and 'In a Station' their particular quality of ache. Robbie Robertson has described Manuel as the soul of The Band's sound, the element that was irreplaceable and that no subsequent lineup could replicate. He struggled severely with alcohol and drug addiction throughout his adult life, a struggle that The Band's music circled without ever quite addressing directly.

Manuel died on March 4, 1986, by suicide in a motel room in Winter Park, Florida, while The Band was on a reunion tour. He was 42. The town of Stratford has honoured him with a street named Manuel Street. The town itself — its Victorian downtown, its river walks, its theatre — bears no other visible connection to one of the most distinctive voices in rock music history, but for fans of The Band it represents the Canadian small-town origins of half the group's founding membership.