A Canadian born in 1943 wrote one of the definitive songs about the American Civil War.

And one of the definitive songs about the fight to form U.S. labor unions during the Great Depression.

And one about street hustlers, one about a lovestruck, gambling truck driver headed to Lake Charles, Louisiana, and another that collects a gaggle of oddballs into a setting inspired by Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel.

These tales — “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” “King Harvest,” “Life Is a Carnival,” “Up on Cripple Creek,” and “The Weight” — were penned by Robbie Robertson. The chief songwriter and lead guitarist for The Band, Robertson, who passed away Wednesday at age 80, practically invented the Americana genre.

When The Band retreated to Woodstock, New York, in 1967 to compile the tracks that would become its debut LP “Music from Big Pink,” psychedelia was raging. London was swinging, the Beatles sang “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” Jimi Hendrix lit his guitar on fire. But Robertson and The Band had different ideas.

“I wanted to write music that felt like it could’ve been written 50 years ago, tomorrow, yesterday — that had this lost-in-time quality,” Robertson once said.

How about a century ago? Robertson’s compositions seemed to bring to life broken Confederate soldiers, battered Southern farmers, randy cowboys under the stars, and a hundred characters more out of Mark Twain then the Summer of Love.

Robertson was just a 16-year-old rock ‘n’ roll kid when he started playing with Canadian-based singer Ronnie Hawkins in 1960. But relentlessly touring behind Hawkins turned him and his Band-mates into seasoned pros. Half a decade later, the guys graduated to backing Bob Dylan on his first electric tour. Robertson then had the wonderful audacity to emerge from an apprenticeship with one of the world’s best songwriters as, well, one of the world’s best songwriters.

Behind Robertson’s catalog, and his lyrical and economical guitar solos, The Band rejected the sonics of the ’60s. By the ’70s, other artists had followed its lead. The Grateful Dead stopped jamming (for a moment) and recorded folk-rock classics influenced by Robertson’s style in “American Beauty” and “Workingman’s Dead.” Groups such as Little Feat and the Eagles absorbed the country and Southern influences — four of five Band members were Canadian despite their aesthetic.

Robertson had the rare humility to end The Band before it lost its mojo. That end was captured spectacularly in Martin Scorsese-directed 1976 concert film “The Last Waltz.”

But Robertson never stopped writing little masterpieces. He penned film scores for other Scorsese films. He released a series of stunningly diverse and strange solo albums. With Cayuga and Mohawk ancestry, Robertson was the ideal choice to create the soundtrack for the documentary film “The Native Americans.”

Of course, Roberson was an ideal choice to write anything from a Civil War lament to a tune about Carmen and the Devil walking side-by-side.