WOODSTOCK, N.Y. — He was that impossible rarity in modern music, a figure at once indelibly international and utterly local, whose shows in his hilltop barn drew fans and musicians from around the world, as well as the local carpenters, cops and firefighters who were part of his daily life.


More than two thousand of them came out on Thursday to mourn Levon Helm’s death and to celebrate the elusive alchemy he had created, which turned strangers into friends, the past into the present and Woodstock once again into a magical destination decades after its heyday was thought to have passed.


“He wanted everyone to know they were welcome, they were among friends,” said Pete Caligiure, a plumber from Bellmore, on Long Island, who left home with his family at 6 a.m. to arrive in time to be on the first bus to be driven to Mr. Helm’s wake at the barn where the former member of the Band had held his famous Midnight Rambles. “He was just the realest, most soulful person who ever made music, and it was euphoria to be a part of it.”


Mr. Helm, known for his boisterous drumming and weathered voice, came to Woodstock in the late 1960s at the time that Bob Dylan and his other bandmates were turning it into an unlikely musical Mecca. He died of cancer last week at 71.


Mr. Helm went out the way he lived his life — with a public wake at home, his closed coffin next to his drum set at the barn where he gave the concerts, starting in 2004, that proved to be his resoundingly successful final act.


He was, friends said, the most unpretentiously public of performers, entranced by the degree to which his music, a timeless blend of American musical forms drifting back far into the nation’s rural past, became a part of the place where he lived. He played not just at the Rambles, which were originally meant to defray his medical bills and to pay his mortgage, but at times on the Town Green, as well as around the world.


“Levon had deep Southern roots, a graciousness and infectious quality that played out in his life and music,” Happy Traum, a longtime Woodstock musician, said in an interview this week. “I think these were the happiest days of his life, that he could invite all these people into his living room and treat them like houseguests for the evening.”


And so those guests, and many who wish that they had been, came out — all, it seemed, with their own story.


The Caligiures had seen Mr. Helm perform 50 to 60 times and brought the collection of drumsticks that he had given them and their 6-year-old daughter, Samantha, who went to about eight of the shows. Marc Sheff of Bayside, Queens, said he had been to more than 200 of the Rambles. Ione Crenshaw, the wife of the musician Marshall Crenshaw, a Ramble veteran who was away on tour, was there with a bouquet of lilacs. Chad and Janet Shearer had flown in from Terranora, Australia, hoping to get to a Ramble this weekend.


Jeanne Weiss, from nearby Saugerties, who plays in a group called the Bluestone Trio, was a big fan who had lived next door to the house that provided the name for the Band’s first album, “Music From Big Pink.” (“It was more like salmon,” she said.)


Inevitably, along with the reverence for Mr. Helm and his work were questions about what happens now, and how much of Woodstock and its music may die with him.


Mark McKenna, who came to Woodstock in the 1970s to work for Albert Grossman, the manager and entrepreneur who first brought Mr. Dylan to town, said in a phone interview on Wednesday that “in the long reach” of the town’s musical history, Mr. Helm was second only to Mr. Dylan as an influential figure. He said that in many ways the town had gone from a creative hub to “a kind of second-home paradise for exurbanites from New York.”


“Not to sound negative or pessimistic,” he said, “but I felt as if someone were pulling a door closed when I heard how serious his illness was, and then that he had passed. I just thought, wow, that is really the end of an era.”


But others, while saying it is far too early to contemplate what comes next, noted that Mr. Helm had put together a remarkable house band that was led by Mr. Dylan’s longtime associate, Larry Campbell, and included his daughter, Amy Helm, as a featured singer. And they said that what Mr. Helm had built meant too much to the music and the town he had loved to let it simply disappear.


“What started as this second act, like an afterthought, almost a footnote to this tremendous career, became this thing that Woodstock came to depend on, at the center of this remarkable musical community,” John Sebastian, the former leader of the Lovin’ Spoonful and now one of Woodstock’s leading musical elders, said in an interview this week.


“So what happens next?” he added. “I have asked this question at dinnertime three days running, and I ask it of all the brothers and sisters, who are part of this thing. We really as a community are holding our breath hoping that what Levon has created doesn’t have to evaporate the minute he’s not there. Some really deep foundations have been drilled on that little hill, and it’s going to be our challenge to see how we can keep this spirit going.”