Jerry Garcia, celebrated musician, tireless live performer and master of American musical traditions, was born in San Francisco on this historic day, August 1, 1942.
Garcia is best known as the prolific songwriter, lead guitarist and most visible face of The Grateful Dead. The band emerged from the West Coast counterculture of the 1960s to become a formidable touring act for 30 years.
The band defied music industry conventions that called for shortened three-minute albums for broadcast and retail sales.
“The Grateful Dead didn't play in sets; there weren't eight numbers a set, then a twenty-five-minute break, and so on, four or five sets and then the close,” wrote Tom Wolfe in “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” his influential 1968 book of literary nonfiction that captured the hallucinogenic haze of the California counterculture.
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“The Dead could play a song for five minutes or thirty minutes,” Wolfe wrote. “Who was keeping the beat? Who could keep the beat with the story sliced up? The Dead could get as high as anybody.”
Garcia died in 1995, days after his 53rd birthday, after years of battling health problems and addiction.
Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead performs at Wembley Empire Pool, London, April 7, 1972. (Michael Putland/Getty Images)
Garcia's image remains closely aligned with the San Francisco music scene of the late 1960s and the turmoil of American society that consumed that era.
But Garcia was largely apolitical.
Artistically, he is a giant of American song.
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Garcia’s first musical love was the banjo, one of the few instruments invented in America. At age 20, he played in the bluegrass band Hart Valley Drifters, with whom he made his first known studio recording, The Wall Street Journal reported in 2016.
“The five-string banjo was the first instrument that really consumed him, around 1962, when he was practicing for hours every day,” instrument maker Deering said in 2019.
Jerry Garcia plays pedal steel guitar with The Grateful Dead at the Oakland Coliseum on July 24, 1987. (Larry Hulst/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
Garcia formed a jug band in 1964 with future Dead bandmates Bob Weir and Rob “Pigpen” McKernan. They recorded an album of folk songs under the name Mother McCree's Uptown-Jug Champions.
Garcia played the banjo, guitar and kazoo.
He taught himself to play the pedal steel guitar, an instrument popularized in the Hawaiian Islands and still often heard in country music today.
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Garcia excelled at pedal steel guitar enough to play it on the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young hit “Teach Your Children.” His distinctive high notes give the song its upbeat, folk-country appeal.
It became a chart hit in 1970 and enjoyed decades of airplay on album-focused FM radio.
Garcia and the Grateful Dead turned to Merle Haggard's country classic “Mama Tried” during their troubled midnight show at Woodstock in August 1969, and closed with a 45-minute version of “Turn On Your Love Light,” a 1961 R&B classic by Bobby Bland.
Stephen Stills, left, and David Crosby of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young perform at Woodstock in Bethel, New York, on August 17, 1969. The band invited Jerry Garcia to play pedal steel guitar on their next album. (Photos International/Getty Images)
In 2015, SavingCountryMusic.com asked whether the Grateful Dead—which is neither a rock nor a country group—was the most important American band of all time.
“The Grateful Dead demonstrated not only their competence, but also their dedication to distinctively American musical forms,” the site noted.
Garcia's distinctive high notes give the song “Teach Your Children” its sunny, folk-country appeal.
Garcia was born to play American music. His parents named him after Jerome Kern, the legendary Broadway composer who helped create such classics of the American songbook as “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” and “The Way You Look Tonight.”
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Garcia briefly served his country off the stage.
He joined the army in 1960, but proved to be a terrible soldier. He was discharged as a general that same year.
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Rolling Stone magazine published “The 50 Best Jerry Garcia Songs” in 2020. “Uncle John's Band” topped the list, praised for its odes to American music.
“With a title that references his middle name, it offers an image of a singer and his violin by the river, gathering a ragtag group of misfits and outcasts into a community,” Rolling Stone said.
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“With Garcia, Bob Weir and Phil Lesh joining their fragile voices to proclaim their hippie tribalism as part of a great American tradition,” the publication added.
