The only song that the Grateful Dead played throughout their entire career
Like almost all bands, the Grateful Dead relied on cover songs during their earliest days together. They were plugged into the zeitgeist and marching to its beat.
With an eclectic group of musicians, including a bluegrass banjo player on lead guitar, a blues purist on keyboards, and an avant-garde composer on bass, the Dead needed to find common ground somewhere in the music world. They settled on some classic folk songs like ‘I Know You Rider’, modern hits like ‘Dancing in the Street’, and the old-school blues favoured by Ron ‘Pigpen’ McKernan.
But one genre that most of the members had in common was jug music. Pigpen, Jerry Garcia, and Bob Weir all played together in Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions before jumping ship over to rock and roll music. While there, they picked some classic jug songs that would later filter into their repertoire with the Grateful Dead.
The genre is defined as thus: “Jug Band: a band that uses primitive or improvised instruments (such as jugs, washboards and kazoos) to play blues, jazz, and folk music”. Initially, the DIY element might have been forced by necessity, but during the genre’s revival in the 1950s, it came to represent a hodgepodge, freedom blend of anything that would make you move.
The guys in the Dead adored this attitude. I aligned with the notion of collectivism and liberation that they were looking to spearhead. But they did so by looking back into the past. Specifically, the members of the Dead favoured Noah Lewis, the harmonica player and songwriter for Cannon’s Jug Stompers in the 1920s.
Lewis’ songs wound up being radically rearranged by the Dead, with ‘Viola Lee Blues’ becoming an early psychedelic improvisational vehicle and ‘New Minglewood Blues’ becoming a blues number favoured by Weir. But another one of Lewis’ songs was included in the Dead’s sets from the very beginning: ‘Beat It On Down The Line’.
First played by Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions in 1964, the lack of surviving setlists means that there’s no official sign of ‘Beat It On Down The Line’ in 1965, the same year that The Warlocks officially became the Grateful Dead. The first recorded instance of the Dead playing the song came from February of 1966 during the brief period when the band moved down to Los Angeles with their soundman, Owsley ‘Bear’ Stanley.
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The first known live performance of ‘Beat It On Down The Line’ came on February 6th, 1966, at the Northbridge Acid Test in North Hills, California. Bob Weir was the vocalist, and soon, ‘Beat It On Down The Line’ became a key part of the Dead’s repertoire. Even as the band changed, losing and gaining members across various years and lineups, Weir consistently returned to ‘Beat It On Down The Line’ as one of his go-to tracks.
That doesn’t mean that the song was always a favourite. There are only four known instances of the band playing ‘Beat It On Down The Line’ in 1968 as the Dead began to explore their original material more thoroughly. However, Weir couldn’t stay away, performing the song on a near-nightly basis throughout 1971 and 1972.
The song settled into a more occasional role in 1973 and 1974, often being played once every other show. When the Dead took a live hiatus in 1975, they only played four shows, but ‘Beat It On Down The Line’ made an appearance at two of them. Simply put, it was a touchstone that they kept returning to because, in some ways, it defined them. Nobody represented Weird Old America better, and their take on this classic track epitomised that.
The warhorse nature of ‘Beat It On Down The Line’ started to become less frequent in the 1980s, with the song disappearing for weeks or even months on end between plays. Still, every year had at last one ‘Beat It On Down The Line’. There was only a single exception: the Dead never played the song in 1995, their final year together before Jerry Garcia’s passing in August.
For a band that has played literally thousands of tracks, this little old gem is curiously, but profoundly, at the centre of their live crown.
