Garth Hudson, whose intricate swirls of Lowrey organ helped elevate the Band from rollicking juke-joint refugees into one of the most resonant and influential rock groups of the 1960s and ’70s, died on Tuesday in Woodstock, N.Y. He was 87 and the last surviving original member of the group.

His death, at a nursing home, was confirmed by Jan Haust, a close friend and colleague.

Mr. Hudson did far more than play the organ. A musical polymath whose work room at home included arcana like sheet music for century-old standards and hymns, he played almost anything — saxophone, accordion, synthesizers, trumpet, French horn, violin — and in endless styles that could at various times be at home in a conservatory, a church, a carnival or a roadhouse.

He was the one who set up, installed and maintained the recording equipment in the pink ranch house in Saugerties, N.Y., where Bob Dylan and the Band recorded more than 100 songs that came to be known as the basement tapes.

When the Band became a force on its own, he arranged the music on the group’s albums and painstakingly tweaked and honed its recordings. He added brass, woodwinds and eclectic flourishes that accentuated the group’s homespun authenticity, a quality that set it apart from the psychedelia and youthful posturing of the rock of its era.

During its peak, the Band was famously a collaborative operation informed by the songwriting and barbed guitar playing of Robbie Robertson and the soulful singing and musicianship of Levon Helm, Rick Danko and Richard Manuel. But critics and his fellow band members agreed that Mr. Hudson played an essential role in raising the group to another level entirely.