The artist Donna Jean Godchaux called “a dream” to work with
When it comes to the roles of a rock and roll band, it’s easy for someone like Donna Jean Godchaux to be forgotten along the way.
As much as people like the idea of having a community onstage whenever they play, the idea of a background singer outshining the lead guitarist is pretty much slim to none in most of the greatest rock and roll bands. But judging by how many legends Godchaux got to work with, she could hold her own with any band in and out of the studio.
While her main role as one of the members of the Grateful Dead is her greatest claim to fame, her role as a studio musician can’t be understated. The whole idea of many studio technicians is to be virtually faceless half the time, but if you look at the impact that everyone from Larry Carlton to Jim Keltner had on the world of rock, Godchaux definitely feels at home with that kind of company as well.
Because when you think about her track record, none of the artists she was working with were going to settle for anything less than perfection. ‘The Dead’ may have been about letting the music carry them to another place half the time, but it takes a lot more than being on the same creative wavelength to get someone to feel like a single musical entity whenever they started playing.
And when looking at the artists that Godchaux worked with like Neil Diamond and Boz Scaggs, they were no strangers to that mentality, either. Especially when working with backup singers, you have to make sure that everyone sounds like one singular voice whenever they start harmonising, but if there was one artist that was bound to rule everything with an iron hand, it was going to be Elvis Presley.
Everyone might like to make fun of Presley for how he looked during the final years of his life, but after years in the business, he knew there was no room for merely “decent” musicians. He had to get the best of the best, and while anyone in Godchaux’s position would have been shaking, she remembered that the ‘King of Rock and Roll’ couldn’t have been more accommodating to her.
Presley was definitely going after a certain sound, but Godchaux thought singing with him felt absolutely perfect, saying, “He was in the control room. And he would listen to each one of us individually. And the critiquing wasn’t like [yelling], it was, ‘you guys are really knocking this one out’. He was really generous and encouraging. And so nice. And Priscilla was there as well. You talk about two beautiful people, oh my gosh (laughs). It was a dream come true. We could not even believe when we got the phone call that Elvis wanted us to sing on his album that he was doing.”
And listening to ‘Suspicious Minds’, you can hear that happiness shining through in the background. All the attention was bound to go on that booming voice of Presley’s throughout every piece of the tune, but with Godchaux in the background, it makes every single word that comes out of his mouth have a little bit more weight to it.
Then again, that’s always the best way to make some of the greatest tunes. It’s one thing to spend hours and hours making sure that every single piece of the musical puzzle is right, but the real magic comes with artists that are getting into the vocal booth for the pure love of making music.
