Levon Helm [ tickets ] has lined up a pair of dates behind his first studio album in 25 years, as well as a slate of holiday editions of his popular Midnight Ramble series of shows performed in his home studio.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, who rose to fame in the '60s and '70s as the drummer in The Band, will tackle a March 7-8 engagement at New York's Beacon Theater with the Levon Helm Band as he continues his comeback from throat cancer, first diagnosed in 1998, which left him unable to sing for more than five years.

Also, Helm's monthly Midnight Ramble sessions offer five more dates in December, with Dec. 8 and 15 shows preceding a trio of shows leading up to New Year's Eve.

The informal shows, which Helm and his band perform with a revolving cast of guest artists, take place in Helm's recording studio, located on his sprawling property in Woodstock, NY. Past Ramble guests have included the late Johnny Johnson, Hubert Sumlin, John Sebastian, Emmylou Harris, Dr. John, Allen Toussaint, Nick Lowe, Gillian Welch, Elvis Costello and Donald Fagen.

"We really started it just to have a place to play," Helm told an interviewer from Blues Wax magazine earlier this year. "There are so few places to play anymore. But it sure has turned out even better than I had hoped. It's got some kind of legs underneath it."

"Dirt Farmer," the 67-year-old Helm's fourth solo album and first since a 1982 self-titled effort, came together at the prodding of his musician daughter Amy, who approached multi-instrumentalist Larry Campbell, a longtime fixture in Bob Dylan's touring band, with the idea of recording some duets with her father.

"The three of us got together," Campbell said in a press release, "Levon started singing some songs that he'd learned as a kid, and it just knocked me out. At that point, the concept of doing a duets record began to evolve into something bigger. Amy and I agreed to co-produce a record with Levon playing drums and doing acoustic versions of tunes he'd learned as a kid along with tunes in a similar mode by modern songwriters.

"We were doing it without any goal in mind, just to record the stuff, because this was just a year after Levon had started singing again, and his voice sounded so credible and compelling--especially on this more organic, woodsy kind of stuff.”