Ever so self-effacingly, Garth Hudson breathed history into songs. At his magisterial Lowrey organ, he summoned Bach, hymns, the gospel church or a circus calliope. At the piano, he bounced through ragtime chords and splashed out filigrees of honky-tonk or jazz. On accordion, he could invoke a Cajun fais-do-do, a medicine show, a polka or the skirl of a bagpipe. On saxophones, he built cozy studio horn sections and occasionally stepped forward for a plaintive solo. And as his equipment choices expanded, he deployed synthesizers and electric keyboards as scenic backdrops, brass bands and wry commentary.

Hudson, the last surviving original member of the Band, died on Tuesday at 87. Here, in chronological order, are 11 tracks — all but one by the Band — that touch on the breadth of his music.

Bob Dylan’s 1966 tour of England, backed by Hudson and other members of what would become the Band, was famously a trial by fire, where Dylan’s new electric material faced boos along with applause. In hindsight the music was invincible: defiant, purposeful, rightfully confident in its breakthroughs. Hudson buttressed Al Kooper’s original organ part into a chordal fortress, part of an incendiary performance that surges to peak after peak.

From the casually brilliant sessions that came to be known as the Basement Tapes, “Yazoo Street Scandal” is all stops and starts: a sputtering beat, a hopscotching bass line, Levon Helms’s shouted vocals. It’s subtly threaded together by Hudson’s understated organ, which sustains tones in the background or chortles between the lines.

The buzzing, shivering notes that open “This Wheel’s on Fire,” and the ominous repeating chords at the end of each chorus, come from Hudson’s clavinet — a glimmer of psychedelic experimentation tucked behind the Band’s rootsy demeanor.

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