In the WSJ today ($) there’s a feature on Levon Helm, who has been holding a Sunday jam session at his Woodstock home for several years and released an album last year. The article, however, is breathlessly pegged to the Grammys:

It’s a long way from the sugar maples of upstate New York to the klieg lights of Los Angeles, but Levon Helm is Grammy-bound. It’s been a long time coming for the veteran drummer, singer and actor whose storied career with the Band and Bob Dylan took him to the summit of rock stardom in the ’70s. Whatever the impact of the writers’ strike on the event itself, Mr. Helm will be an honoree come Sunday.

Helm is getting a lifetime achievement award as a member of the Band, and an album he recorded is up for best traditional folk album. The Journal story raises two issues:

• As I wrote recently, the confounding thing about the Grammys is the myriad absurdist questions that come up whenever you try to focus on virtually anything that has to do with the misbegotten, silly awards and the organization that dispenses them. Why is Helm being nominated as a folk artist? Like Bruce Springsteen, he’s a faded rock artist dabbling in a slightly different genre, and benefiting from his celebrity involvement in it. (Springsteen won a best folk album Grammy for his pinched “Seeger Sessions” album a couple of years ago.) Why is the Band getting a lifetime achievement award now, 22 and nine years, respectively, after the deaths of Richard Manuel and Rick Danko? And, um, I was just reading the Wall Street Journal, which wrote this about the Band:

The Band’s first two albums — “Music From Big Pink” (1968) and “The Band” (1969) — remain timeless classics. From 19th-century folk ballads to modern-day R&B, the group had found a way to distill traditional music without sacrificing the spirit of rock. They were anachronists with soul, their voices locking into harmonies that were refreshingly unsophisticated for the time, and they were self-sufficient. Each played a variety of instruments, three of them sang lead and they all benefited from Mr. Robertson’s songwriting genius.

Boy: “timeless’; “classics”; “genius.” Why haven’t they ever won a Grammy before?

• I have a lot of respect for Ashley Kahn, whom I know from NPR and who wrote the Journal piece, but why do the Grammys get credit for recognizing an artist now, when it never paid attention to him when he was young and important and, um, good? The journalistic issue, for which I blame the Journal’s editors, is a slightly finer one: Why doesn’t this get mentioned? I don’t know of a reliable resource that has a complete list of Grammy nominations, but odds are the Band were never even nominated for their signal albums, which include “The Band,” “Music from Big Pink,” “Rock of Ages,” and “The Last Waltz,” not to mention their deserving co-billing on “The Basement Tapes,” “Before the Flood” and “Planet Waves.”

In closing, I would propose Hitsville’s First Rule of Grammy Coverage: In giving NARAS credit for any nominations of an actual great recording artist, the article should give in complete detail the organization’s historical disregard for the artist in question.