The death was announced in a statement by Mr. Robertson’s manager, Jared Levine. No other details were given.

Mr. Robertson was widely credited with helping forge a music genre known as Americana that brought together folk, country and rock and leaned heavily on traditions of storytelling and sense of place, contrasting with the emerging psychedelic sound in the 1960s.

The throwback sensibilities of the Band’s music carried influences of some of Mr. Robertson’s early collaborators, including Bob Dylan, and helped inspire bands such as the Grateful Dead with “Workingman’s Dead” (1970) and Elton John’s “Tumbleweed Connection” (1971) with songs of struggles, lean times and simple pleasures.

“We just went completely left when everyone else went right,” Mr. Robertson once said.

The Band stayed together eight years after their debut album, “Music from Big Pink,” in 1968 but left a profound mark on popular music and songwriting, building tales that often took listeners on journeys of love or anguish. “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” is the lament of a Confederate soldier staring defeat in the face. Mr. Robertson’s 1969 song “Up on Cripple Creek” is delivered from the point of view of a truck driver heading to Louisiana to see his lover.

“The Weight” is full of allusions to burdens and quests for redemption, which Mr. Robertson said was influenced by the surrealist style of Spanish film director Luis Buñuel and themes about the sacred and profane.

“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,” Mr. Robertson said on the PBS documentary “Shakespeares in the Alley” aired in 1996.

Mr. Robertson and his bandmates — drummer Levon Helm, bassist Rick Danko, pianist Richard Manuel and organist Garth Hudson — began to define their style in the mid-1960s as the backing band for Dylan during a pivotal time. Dylan had decided to integrate electric guitars in his music, making the jump at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival in a performance that left some folk purists angered and dismayed.

Mr. Robertson played guitar on Bob Dylan’s “Blonde on Blonde” album (1966) and the Band took part in Dylan’s “basement tapes” sessions in 1967 in Big Pink, the nickname of a house rented by some members of the group in West Saugerties, N.Y. (“The Basement Tapes” were released as an album in 1975.)

As Mr. Robertson and his bandmates explored Dylan’s increasing blend of folk and rock, they began to chart their own course. The idea, he said, was attempting to reinterpret American Southern roots music. “The music came down from the [Mississippi] river and from up the river and met,” he told music journalist Paul Zollo in 1998, “and it made something new. I always looked at that as kind of the source of the whole thing.”

Mr. Robertson became the de facto leader of the Band, and then portrayed himself as struggling to keep the group together as infighting and drug use threatened to tear them apart over the span of seven albums including “The Band” (1969) and “Stage Fright” (1970).

Their final show, held in 1976 at the Winterland arena in San Francisco, became the centerpiece of Scorsese’s 1978 film. Joining the Band onstage were performers including Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and the Staple Singers. Eric Clapton, who joined the Band in the show, had once become so impressed by the group that he asked to join — and was politely turned down.

“The Last Waltz” also began a long collaboration between Mr. Robertson and Scorsese. Mr. Robertson contributed to the soundtrack in films such as “Raging Bull” (1980), “Casino” (1995), “The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013) and “The Irishman” (2019). Scorsese’s next film scheduled for release this year, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” includes Mr. Robertson’s music.

“And we’ve sat up many a night, a late night, and, and confessed that he was just a frustrated musician, and I was the frustrated filmmaker,” Mr. Robertson said in the PBS documentary. “So I guess that’s where it comes from.”

Jaime Royal Robertson was born on July 5, 1943, in Toronto. His father was killed in a highway crash before he was born. His mother, who remarried, was a member of tribes including the Mohawk and, as a boy, Mr. Robertson gained exposure to Indigenous music and oral storytelling traditions on the Six Nations Reserve.

As a teenager, Mr. Robertson found a job on the carnival circuit, an experience that would later shape his work as co-writer for the 1980 film “Carny.” He played guitar in high school bands and then joined a group led by a rockabilly star from Arkansas, Ronnie Hawkins, who made it big in Canada. Also on board were the core members of what would become the Band.

Hawkins, with Mr. Robertson and the others in tow, headed off for gigs at roadhouses and dance club across the South. For Mr. Robertson, it was life changing. “I came in and I felt this whole rhythm to life down here,” he told the music magazine Q in October 1991. “It feels good, it’s funky, it’s mysterious — it just kind of got under my skin. And the more I learned about it, the more I loved it.”

Mr. Robertson and the others broke away in 1964, cutting some singles and working with other Canadian folk and rock groups. In 1965, Mr. Robertson and his bandmates were offered a spot on the Dylan tour.

After their second album, “The Band,” the group was featured on the cover of Time magazine. Success, however, only seemed to amplify the Band’s internal tensions. In Mr. Robertson’s 2016 memoir, “Testimony,” he recounted how cocaine and alcohol began to cloud the Band’s focus.

Mr. Robertson saved his most biting recollections for his bandmate Helm and claims that drugs had consumed him. “It was like some demon had crawled into my friend’s soul and pushed a crazy, angry button,” Mr. Robertson wrote.

Dylan helped the Band rebound by bringing the group aboard for the 1974 album “Planet Waves.” By 1975, however, Mr. Robertson said it was clear that the Band was close to splintering. Their last album, “Northern Lights — Southern Cross,” was pulled together in a Southern California studio and included one of Mr. Robertson’s few songs for the Band specifically about Canada, “Acadian Driftwood.”

Mr. Robertson is often portrayed as the catalyst for the Band’s breakup, suggesting that he was eager for a solo career. But the bad blood with Helm was there for all to see. Helm laid the blame squarely on Mr. Robertson in his 1993 autobiography, “This Wheel’s on Fire,” and refused to appear at the group’s 1994 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction. The Band reunited for three albums in the 1990s, but with Robertson. (Garth Hudson is now the last surviving original member of the Band.)

The breakup was everyone’s doing, Mr. Robertson told the Canadian interview show “George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight.” “This was five men making a decision,” he said. “It wasn’t my decision. And whatever happened it would happen because of every one of us. If one of those pistons wasn’t working perfectly, then everything was off kilter.”

Mr. Robertson released the album “Robbie Robertson” in 1986 and “Storyville” in 1991, an homage to New Orleans and its music. He worked with performers including Tom Petty, Ringo Starr and Neil Diamond. His final solo album was “Sinematic” in 2019, featuring Mr. Robertson and Van Morrison in a duet on the track “I Hear You Paint Houses.”

The same year, Daniel Roher’s documentary on the Band, “Once Were Brothers,” was released, relying heavily on Mr. Robertson’s recollections. Mr. Robertson had become involved in soundtracks including Scorsese films “The Color of Money” (1986) and “Shutter Island” (2010).

“I love the sense of starting from a place where I have no idea what to do,” Mr. Robertson told Variety in 2018, “and then some light shines through and it turns into something magical.”

Mr. Robertson’s marriage to Dominique Bourgeois ended in divorce. They had two daughters and a son. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.

Despite the grand send-off, Mr. Robertson said “The Last Waltz” might not have been the end for him and the others as the Band.

“The idea was that everybody was going to take step back, gather themselves. … So everybody went off and did some individual projects just to shuffle the deck,” he said in the Stroumboulopoulos interview, “and nobody came back.”