Despite some aural ambiguity (and the presence of Anna Lee), it is Fannie, not Annie, from whom the load is taken in "The Weight." As explained by Robbie Robertson in an interview with the Wall Street Journal and summarized in The Forward:
As for the title character, such as she is, Robertson confirms once and for all that she is “Fanny,” and not “Annie,” as many have often misheard it to be. (Try singing “Take a load off Fanny” to yourself and you can see how the two easily converge). In fact, there was a Fanny upon whom the tune was based. As part of his self-education in European avant-garde cinema, Robertson studied Bergman’s and Bunuel’s film scripts, which he found at the legendary Gotham Book Mart on West 47th Street in Manhattan – located in a neighborhood with which he was already familiar from his days running diamonds from Toronto to New York City on behalf of a Jewish mobster uncle. The bookstore was originally opened on New Year’s Day, 1920, by Frances “Fanny” Steloff, who still ran it when Robertson haunted the film section in the late 1960s. Steloff eventually donated the building to the American Friends of the Hebrew University Foundation. Those film scripts had a huge influence on Robertson both thematically and as a songwriter; they gave him permission to write songs that included jump cuts and fadeouts and used surrealistic symbolism in a particular manner that became Robertson’s trademark, while dealing with questions of God, mortality, and fate.
Here is a 1970 clip of The Band in which it can be heard a little more clearly, especially at 3:49 where, unlike the chorus, there are not successive unvoiced fricatives:
I'm frankly surprised anyone ever thought it was Annie.
Posted by: Michael Risch | February 17, 2019 at 06:35 PM
Everyone knew her as Nancy. Great post, Steve.
Posted by: Bernie Burk | February 18, 2019 at 12:55 PM