The Grateful Dead songs Jerry Garcia loved most
There are a lot of adjectives that swirl around the legacy of the Grateful Dead leader Jerry Garcia. The guitarist was such an indelible artist that he rarely refused to sit still, constantly jamming through his personal and professional life. Such movement makes it hard to pin him down to a particular persona. Undoubtedly being exactly what Garcia would have wanted, the term “mercurial” seems the most appropriate when trying to categorise the uncategorisable.
A man naturally cautious of the press, Garcia rarely sat down for serious interviews and even more infrequently sat down to reflect on his past work. For an artist like Garcia, to look backwards meant to give up on life itself. His attitude toward creation was always about delivering something textured, enchanting and, most importantly, something nobody else could provide. It was an ethos championed by the Dead during their notorious jam-heavy live shows.
The group would land on stage and, within a few notes, convince their audience that this would be like no show they had ever experienced before. It was a tried-and-tested method that ensured the group had a welcoming audience at every stop of their tours, and it usually gathered a new chunk of the audience to accompany them on the road. Garcia was happiest on stage and in the moment, and that sentiment suggests why he was never keen to sit and reminisce about the band’s work.
However, there were a few occasions when Garcia would pick out some of the work from the band as particular moments of pride. One such moment was ‘Stella Blue’. A poignantly sad song, the track sees Garcia provide an aching soundtrack to Robert Hunter’s painful lyrics. It could be considered one of the partnership’s best collaborations, and it was a song that the guitarist was notably proud of: “I was so proud of it as a composer — ‘Hey, this is a slick song!’” Garcia would later state about its inception.
Written with the creatively crumbling walls of New York’s Chelsea Hotel, Garcia would confirm that he grew to love the song even more: “That’s a good example of a song I sang before I understood it. It has a sort of brittle pathos in it that I didn’t get until I’d been singing it for a while.” First played at Pigpen’s final show with the band, it would go on to be played around the world over 300 times more, signifying its spot within the hearts and minds of the band and fans alike.
Two more tracks that have resonated with Garcia are ‘Scarlet Begonias’ and ‘Ship of Fools’. During an unprecedented interview with Steve Weitzman in 1976, Garcia noted that the two songs were two of his more treasured tracks. After Weitzman shared his love of ‘Scarlet Begonias’, Garcia replies, “Yeah, that’s another song too. That’s a song I like. ‘Ship Of Fools’ is a song I like an awful lot. But my relationship to them changes.”
Like any true artist, Garcia was never happy to rest on his laurels; as he explained, his relationship with his material was always evolving: “Sometimes I really like a song after I’ve written it and I don’t like it at all a year later. And some of them, I’m sort of indifferent to, but we perform it and find they have a real long life. For me to sing a song, I really have to feel some relationship to it. I can’t just bullshit about it. Otherwise, it’s just empty, and it’s no fun.”
But, during the conversation, he did share a particular affection for one of the band’s tunes: “I really loved ‘Row Jimmy Row’. That was one of my favourite songs of ones that I’ve written. I loved it. Nobody else really liked it very much—we always did it—but nobody liked it very much, at least in the same way I did.”
‘Row Jimmy Row’, taken from Wake the Flood, is a song that also borrows from the talents of Garcia and Hunter. It was played over 200 times by the band and has since become known as Garcia’s favourite dead song of all time. Whether we can expect such a progressive thinker to have always considered the track his favourite is up for debate. The truth is, over the years, every Dead song likely was a Garcia favourite at one time or another.
Jerry Garcia’s favourite Grateful Dead songs:
- ‘Stella Blue’
- ‘Scarlet Begonias’
- ‘Ship of Fools’
- ‘Row Jimmy Row’
