15 wonderful Grateful Dead songs about death
They say there are only two guaranteed things in life, but with quite a few tax fraud convictions in most countries, that list can be whittled down to one: death. It’s the great equaliser, from humans to animals to plants: we all end up on the ground one day.
Unsurprisingly, this inevitability has caused many artists to look at the great beyond. What lies beneath the mortal world is truly anyone’s guess. Whether your views skew more towards the religious ends of the spectrum, it’s hard not to glorify some kind of wonderful oblivion when talking about death in song.
That’s how we’ve accumulated some of the most iconic odes to post-mortem ever put to record, including ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’ by Pink Floyd, ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ by Bob Dylan, and ‘Tears in Heaven’ by Eric Clapton. But if you’ve turned on a classic rock radio station in the last 60 years, you’ve probably heard those tracks ad nauseam.
Instead, maybe it’s time to turn your attention to the work of the Grateful Dead. The legendary jam band isn’t just looking for morbid shock value in their name: throughout their 30 years together, the Dead took frequent looks into what happens when you kick the bucket. Sometimes these were simply allusions, like on ‘Casey Jones’ and ‘Hell in a Bucket’, but other times, the spine-tingling chill of death was impossible to ignore.
Something very strange happened with the Dead: as they aged into their final years and the vitality of their youth disappeared, their songs about buying the farm began to take on a greater emotional resonance. As Jerry Garcia turned from a jaunty, jolly giant to a pale-white angelic figure, his singing about his own mortality became as poignant as it was tragic and inevitable. When Garcia passed away in the summer of 1995, there were plenty of Dead songs that could be used to eulogise him.
Today, we’re taking a look at some of the Dead’s best odes to death. Whether they’re originals or covers, all songs that the Dead played are eligible for this list, not least because of the fact that the Dead transformed just about every song that came into their repertoire. If you’re looking to get morbid, here are the best Grateful Dead songs to help you take on the other side of life.
The best Grateful Dead songs about death:
‘Death Don’t Have No Mercy’
The haunting ‘Death Don’t Have No Mercy’ sounds like one of the Dead’s many traditional songs, but in reality, the track only dates to about five years before the band first formed. Written by old-school southern blues man Reverend Gary David, ‘Death Don’t Have No Mercy’ was first put on tape in 1960.
It was always unsettling to see such a young band play with themes of death and damnation the way that the Dead did, and no song leans into the frightening unknown and tragic familiarity that followed the band like ‘Death Don’t Have No Mercy’. Even though he was still in his 20s, Jerry Garcia’s performance on Live/Dead is emblematic of a much older soul.
‘Morning Dew’
Bonnie Dobson wrote ‘Morning Dew’ chronicling the fallout of nuclear war. While its main characters are still alive, the song’s stark imagery of a couple walking across the charred remains of humanity without sensing another soul comes to its emotional apex as the line, “You didn’t hear no baby cry today”.
On the Dead’s definitive version from Europe ’72, Garcia turns the song’s emotional impact as high as it can possibly go, reaching peaks of bittersweet euphoria with both his voice and his guitar. During the actual performance at the Lyceum Theatre in London, Garcia spent much of the solo with his back turned to the audience, tears running down his face as stirring devastation climbs to its highest point.
‘Black Peter’
Most Grateful Dead songs only play around with the implications of death and the afterlife. Not ‘Black Peter’. When your opening line is “All of my friends come to see me last night / I was laying in my bed and dying”, there’s not a lot of room for interpretation.
Poor old Peter isn’t doing too hot: 105-degree fever and a crowd of friends coming to pay their respects don’t exactly sound like our man is going to make it. But the sentiment that the central Peter character expresses is one that we can all aspire to: “Just wanna have a little peace to die / And a friend or two I love at hand.”
‘Brokedown Palace’
Perhaps the most popular funeral song in the entire Dead catalogue, ‘Brokedown Palace’ has now ascended to a mythical place amongst Deadheads staring down their ultimate fate. Although the song never explicitly mentions deaths, the lyrics act as a heartfelt farewell to a loved one in the face of the darkness that lies beyond.
And what a beautiful farewell it is. With scores of natural images and an acceptance of what’s to come, Robert Hunter crafts the ultimate epigraph for a dying man. “Fare you well, fare you well / I love you more than words can tell / Listen to the river sing sweet songs / To rock my soul.” It’s pure gospel filtered through the unique lens of the Grateful Dead.
‘Box of Rain’
Phil Lesh had an entire song complete: melodies, chord changes, and tempos were all accounted for. What he didn’t have were any words. So Lesh turned to the band’s in-house lyricist, Robert Hunter, to craft a story of his choosing. Taking note of Lesh’s fragile emotional state in the wake of his father’s battle with cancer, Hunter wrote a set of lyrics focused on lifting the burden of a loved one.
“He presented me with some of the most moving and heartfelt lyrics I’ve ever had the good fortune to sing,” Lesh wrote in his memoir Searching for the Sound. “To this day, I’m asked to sing and dedicate the song to those who are recovering, sick, dying, or have already passed on.”
‘Attics of My Life’
More vague and open to interpretation than most of the Dead’s songs about death, ‘Atics of My Life’ might actually not have anything to do with passing on to the next stage of life. Perhaps it’s simply a song about curiosity, or maybe it’s about seizing life while you’re still able.
Lines like “I have spent my life / Seeking all that’s still unsung / Bent my ear to hear the tune / And closed my eyes to see”, however, make it seem like the end is near. It’s another ode to someone who had the power to lift one’s soul, as perfectly summarised in the lines, “In the book of love’s own dreams / Where all the print is blood / Where all the pages are my days / And all my lights grow old / When I had no wings to fly / You flew to me.”
‘Sing Me Back Home’
Merle Haggard was a lifelong favourite of the Grateful Dead. With his outlaw country image and penchant for clever, heartfelt songwriting, the country star was closely aligned with the Dead’s own style of writing. Bob Weir could often be heard taking on Haggard’s ‘Mama Tried’ in concert, but Garcia carved out his own take on Haggard’s songbook with ‘Sing Me Back Home’.
Inspired by his time in prison, Haggard wrote the song as an ode to a death row inmate who asks another inmate to sing him a few songs before he is executed. It’s dark and immensely sad, but thanks to the band firing on all cylinders during its brief time in the Dead’s live set, ‘Sing Me Back Home’ also takes on a triumphant tone when Garcia takes hold of the tune.
‘Bird Song’
Janis Joplin was a close friend of the Grateful Dead, especially singer/keyboardist Ron ‘Pigpen’ McKernan. The two were kindred spirits – hard-drinking types with sensitive sides – who even had a brief romantic relationship before spending the rest of their days as close friends. Neither was long for this world and when Joplin died, it affected everyone within the Dead family.
Not least of which was Robert Hunter, who penned a set of lyrics in her honour. ‘Bird Song’ celebrates the beauty of a unique creature who doesn’t have time to stay. “All I know she sang a little while and then flew on.” The fleetingness of her voice is bittersweet, but ‘Bird Song’ is ultimately the band’s most uplifting song about death, focusing on the beauty of life in the face of a departing soul.
‘He’s Gone’
‘He’s Gone’ wasn’t actually written about death. Hunter originally penned the lyrics as a jab at everyone within the Dead family who trusted Lenny Hart, the band’s one-time manager and father of drummer Mickey Hart, who absconded with the band’s finances around 1970. But as they tend to do, Hunter’s lyrics began to take on new meaning as the band experienced its fair share of passings.
First was Pigpen, for whom the song eventually became a eulogy. As figures like Keith Godchaux, Brent Mydland, and eventually Jerry Garcia passed on, ‘He’s Gone’ transformed into a lament for those who had died within the band’s inner circle. Nowadays, ‘He’s Gone’ is less jaunty and more mournful than it was during its initial days on the road.
‘To Lay Me Down’
When staying in close friend Alan Trist’s London flat in 1970, Robert Hunter downed some retsina wine and composed three of the Grateful Dead’s most beloved sets of lyrics in one sitting: ‘Brokedown Palace’, ‘Ripple’, and ‘To Lay Me Down’. The first two became instantly iconic thanks to their appearances on American Beauty, but the third took a while to catch on.
First recorded on Jerry Garcia’s first solo album in 1971, ‘To Lay Me Down’ made sporadic appearances throughout Dead concerts until 1992. But the impact it made as one of the most tender and simple odes to expiration made it an instant classic, one that was reserved for some of the more gut-wrenching performances of the band’s career.
‘It Must Have Been the Roses’
Robert Hunter was almost exclusively a lyricist in the world of the Grateful Dead. Although he initially befriended Jerry Garcia as a musician in the folk and bluegrass scene of Palo Alto, California, Hunter eventually became a wordsmith solely within the Dead.
There were only two exceptions (three if you believe Hunter’s story that he composed ‘Mr. Charlie’ on his own): ‘Easy Wind’ from Workingman’s Dead and ‘It Must Have Been the Roses’, which never made it onto a Dead studio album but was recorded for Hunter’s solo album Tales of the Great Rum Runners.
‘Mission in the Rain’
‘Mission in the Rain’ is a true deep cut for Deadheads: beloved by the diehards but unknown to casual fans and even medium-level fans. Unless you were intimately familiar with Garcia’s solo album Reflections, the Jerry Garcia Band repertoire, or 1970s Dead tapes, chances are you weren’t necessarily aware of ‘Mission in the Rain’.
But it was performed by the Dead, and even though Garcia claimed that it was autobiographical to the era that he and Hunter lived in the city of San Francisco (hence the titular “Mission”), the overtones and allusions to shuffling off the mortal coil are too strong to ignore.
‘Stella Blue’
Jerry Garcia picked up a habit with the Dead: starting in the 1970s, he would add a number of slow dirges and emotional ballads to the Grateful Dead repertoire. These slow songs usually popped up after the hectic chaos of ‘Drums/Space’, and they frequently discussed death as a true companion to the Dead’s music.
Of all the slow ballads, ‘Stella Blue’ just might be the saddest and most morbid. It also might be the band’s best, highlighting the fact that life might not have a definitive meaning or a certain direction. When all that’s left is pavement and broken dreams, there’s still a song; for many, that song was ‘Stella Blue’.
‘Black Muddy River’
The final song that Jerry Garcia ever sang live couldn’t have been more apt. As a frail and faltering figure, Garcia sang of the final days of summer without knowing that he was approaching his own final summer. It’s tragic in hindsight, but also impossible to ignore the appropriateness of ‘Black Muddy River’ as Garcia’s final statement.
Hunter’s lyrics are a rare song explicitly about death within the Dead catalogue and contain some of the darkest and saddest images he ever wrote for the Dead. There’s still a sense of redemption centred around the central river, though, harkening back to the same waterside images in ‘Brokedown Palace’ and ‘Ripple’.
‘So Many Roads’
As the Dead completed their final trip around the sun, several songs still had never found their way onto a Grateful Dead studio album. In fact, a final Dead studio had been in the works since the release of Built to Last, but it never came to fruition. With Garcias passing in 1995, the final Grateful Dead studio album was not completed.
Of the songs that were supposed to be featured, ‘So Many Roads’ was the one that would have been the truest illustration of a band in their twilight years. A summation of the Dead’s 30-year career that somehow avoided cliche, ‘So Many Roads’ is in many ways the ultimate and final Grateful Dead statement. It is fitting that it follows the path toward death and immortality.
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