Robert Hunter on the type of songs Jerry Garcia favoured
It was almost impossible for anyone to know Jerry Garcia better than Robert Hunter did. Hunter and Garcia met as early as 1961 in the burgeoning Palo Alto beatnik scene with the same group of figures that would eventually birth the city’s folk and hippie scene. While living in their cars, Hunter and Garcia bonded over shared music, film, and literature tastes, with the pair even performing in a few short-lived bands together.
That intimate friendship took on another dimension when Hunter returned from New Mexico in 1967. While away, he had sent Garcia lyrics to a few songs, the likes of which eventually became ‘China Cat Sunflower’, ‘Alligator’, and ‘St. Stephen’. Hunter was quickly tasked with being the official lyricist for the Grateful Dead. Hunter’s mystical and hyper-literate lyrics helped define the band’s style, with Garcia and Hunter continuing to write together until Garcia’s death in 1995.
With such a strong understanding of each other’s musical tastes, Hunter came to recognise what kinds of songs Garcia gravitated toward. “Jerry favours a certain type of folk song,” Hunter told Grateful Dead biographer Blair Jackson in 1988. “He loves the mournful death-connected ballad, the Child Ballad stuff. This is a venerable source which has always spoken to him, and to me as well, which is one reason we got together writing songs – because of that haunting feel certain traditional songs have.”
That explains why so much of the band’s material is death-centric. From the haunting tones of Reverend Gary Davis’ ‘Death Don’t Have No Mercy’ to the fever-pitched original ‘Black Peter’, the Dead leaned into their macabre reputation. Hunter had a habit of returning to his deep knowledge of folk history to find potent lyrics.
“I’m generally deep-sea diving in imagery and getting things that sometimes, as in folk music, you don’t know quite what it means, but it’s resonant,” Hunter explained. “Like that line in that folk song, ‘ten thousand was drownded that never was born.’ It makes the hair stand up on your arms.”
Hunter refers to ‘Nottamun Town’, an American folk song with its roots planted as early as the 1800s. Garcia confirmed that the line had a major effect on him, although when he and Hunter talked to Jackson together in 1991, Garcia recalled the line coming from a different song.
“That line really scared me. It’s from a tune called ‘The Mummer’s Song,’ that Jean Ritchie used to sing,” Garcia explained. “It’s an a capella song with only two verses, and they’re nonsense insofar as that if they have any sense, it’s so deeply symbolic we don’t know what it’s actually about… Not knowing, though, is part of what makes it so evocative. The mystery is part of what makes it interesting to me.”
Ritchie had been performing her family’s version of ‘Nottamun Town’ for years when the song found an unexpected place in popular music history. For the melody of his 1963 song ‘Masters of War’, Bob Dylan borrowed elements from Ritchie’s take on ‘Nottamun Town’, which eventually led to a legal settlement. The waters of folk music are incredibly murky, but if anyone was going to recognise the melody that Dylan was swiping, it probably could have been Robert Hunter.
Check out ‘Nottamun Town’ down below.
