Credit: Alamy

The only Grateful Dead songs to feature Jerry Garcia on banjo

Tue 23 August 2022 19:30, UK

Jerry Garcia was not initially a guitar player. Although a young Garcia had been fascinated by music from an early age, his first love wouldn’t be in rock, folk, blues, or other traditional guitar-related musical genres. Instead, Garcia was enamoured with the sounds of traditional bluegrass music, a hybrid brand of country that emphasized dexterity, speed, and endurance. Through the likes of genre legends Bill Monroe and Earl Scruggs, bluegrass took hold in the Appalachian areas of the United States before drifting across the country and into the California area.

Garcia became obsessed with the form and felt a strong desire to play the music himself. The sounds that he gravitated toward were mostly the lead instrument of bluegrass, the banjo. A five-stringed instrument that found major popularity in the early 20th century, the banjo provided Garcia with a clear path toward mastering the form of bluegrass. He jumped in with both feet, often practising scales and rhythms for hours a day until Garcia became a skilled banjo player.

As folk music became the predominant form of musical expression in the Menlo Park beatnik scene that he found himself in, Garcia found it necessary to begin focusing more seriously on the guitar. Upon meeting Ron ‘Pigpen’ McKernan, Garcia and friends formed Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions, a traditional jug band playing American roots music along with folk and blues. But McKernan had a vision, inspired by The Beatles and the progressing style of Muddy Waters: it was time to go electric.

Soon, Mother McCree’s became The Warlocks, and not long after they took up a short residence at Magoo’s Pizza Parlour in San Francisco, the band changed their name to The Grateful Dead. Privately, Garcia continued to practice his banjo, but the guitar became his primary tool for his artistic expression, leaving his original instrument to remain a reminder of his past rather than a contemporary musical preoccupation.

Even though he rarely played it anymore, Garcia still found the occasional opportunity to bust out the banjo. While recording a truncated single version of their exploratory jam vehicle ‘Dark Star’, Garcia hammered out a rapid-fire flurry of banjo notes over the song’s coda. The appearance was brief and represented Garcia’s only example of recorded banjo for another two years (coincidentally, the coda also featured lyricist Robert Hunter’s sole recorded contribution to the Dead, reciting a poem over the end of the track).

Two years later, the Grateful Dead had fully transitioned away from psychedelic music and began to embrace country music. Workingman’s Dead featured new explorations of acoustic music, including jaunty romps like ‘Uncle John’s Band’, ‘Dire Wolf’, and ‘Casey Jones’. The album also included the uptempo ‘Cumberland Blues’, the most direct connection to bluegrass that the Dead had ever attempted up to that point.

In order to give ‘Cumberland Blues’ a genuine layer of bluegrass stomp, Garcia dusted off his banjo and added an overdubbed gallop to the song’s arrangement. Just as the band sings, “Can I go, buddy, take your shift down the mine,” Garcia’s banjo playing begins to dominate the song. The added twang as a complete about-face for the Dead, the same band who had crafted the impenetrably experimental Anthem of the Sun only two years prior.

Garcia’s interest in the banjo was restarted, and the musician began to seek outlets for his first-favourite instrument. A sit-in with the band High Country at the San Francisco club The Matrix around the recording of Workingman’s Dead was the first step, and soon busting out the banjo with everyone from Paul Kantner and Jefferson Starship to the New Riders of the Purple Sage, the country rock outfit that originally featured Garcia on pedal steel guitar.

In 1973, Garcia would find a new outlet for his banjo, playing with The Old and In the Way, who recorded a self-titled album released in 1973. Garcia played banjo with collaborator David Grisman in the Great American String Band on occasion throughout the mid-1970s, but for most of the next 20 years, Garcia only played the banjo in private. A few gigs with Grisman in the 1990s revived Garcia’s onstage banjo playing for the final time, but when it came to the Grateful Dead, ‘Dark Star’ and ‘Cumberland Blues’ represent the only recorded examples of Garcia’s fascination with the instrument.