“I got caught up into that”: Jerry Garcia’s favourite Joan Baez album
When Jerry Garcia first heard Joan Baez’s music, he had “never heard anything like it before”. This is especially impressive considering the vast expanse of Garcia’s own music collection, which perhaps holds more singles and records than any other musician. Diving into some of these demonstrates all the reasons Grateful Dead created music that transcends the ages.
Grateful Dead will forever remain one of the music industry’s biggest mysteries. For the fans—of whom there are many with bone-deep loyalty—the band created music that went beyond the usual parameters of what constituted “great”. In other words, the Dead’s cultish appeal didn’t just come from the music, it stemmed from the live performances, which held the kind of explosive and spontaneous energy only explicable by words by those who actually witnessed it.
More importantly, Garcia seemed to lead the charge with the Dead’s consistent evolution, not just in the studio but on stage, injecting the utmost creativity often at the spur of the moment. Rolling out rigid sets was never their bag, which gifted audiences with a certain kind of authenticity that no other band had created before or since. This choice, alongside their genre-blending, becomes more intriguing when looking at Garcia’s record collection.
Amid favourites like The Beach Boys, The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, and more, it’s clear that Garcia was drawn to influences from all over, but mainly bluegrass, jazz, and folk music. This eclecticism stems from his ability to resonate with anything as long as it taps into something emotionally deeper. As he put it: “If it’s well-played music, I like it”. Evidently, an attitude that shaped the appeal of the Dead, too.
Garcia’s love of Baez began when he discovered the power of folk music, which wasn’t a tough venture considering the type of music that began to bubble at the surface of 1960s-style lyricism. To Garcia, Baez was about as real as it got, an observation he knew to be true as soon as he heard her first record, Folksingers ‘Round Harvard Square. Beyond the obvious talent in her vocal delivery, Garcia paid close attention to her guitar playing, hoping to achieve the same level of delicacy in his own work.
“When the whole folk-music thing started happening, I got caught up into that,” he explained, continuing, “When Joan Baez’s first record came out I heard it, and I heard her finger-picking the guitar. I’d never heard anything like it before, so I got into that.”
Interestingly, Baez seemed to be one of the few folk singer-songwriters to actually captivate Garcia from the start, as he didn’t even show the same affinity for another leader who emerged at the same time—Bob Dylan. In fact, he admitted he didn’t even like the brooding troubadour until his later work when “he came out with electronic music,” proving that he clearly felt Baez had something Dylan didn’t.
Still, one of the main aspects of Baez’s—and later Dylan’s—work is that it demonstrated how intensely Garcia became drawn to meticulous music that had something to say. Often, he would praise their music as “beautiful” before going into the intricacy of their arrangements, showcasing the various ways he approached the Dead with diligence, hoping to resonate with audiences in exactly the same way.
