The Grateful Dead

Between 1962 and 1964 Garcia sang and played mostly bluegrass, old-time and folk music, in bands that included the Sleepy Hollow Hog Stompers, the Hart Valley Drifters and the Black Mountain Boys. In the Hart Valley Drifters, the Wildwood Boys and the Black Mountain Boys he played alongside David Nelson, who would later co-found the New Riders of the Purple Sage. In the spring of 1964 Garcia and the Black Mountain Boys’ guitarist, Sandy Rothman, drove east to hear bluegrass bands at first hand. They caught Bill Monroe several times, and at a Blue Grass Boys show at Sunset Park in Pennsylvania they met a young mandolin player, David Grisman.

The Warlocks followed in 1965, and as the Grateful Dead they made their name as a rock band. Two albums of 1970, Workingman’s Dead in June and American Beauty in November, turned toward acoustic instruments and vocal harmony and fused bluegrass with rock, folk and country. Garcia’s banjo can be heard on “Cumberland Blues,” and Grisman, who had since moved to California and found Garcia again, played mandolin on “Friend of the Devil” and “Ripple” from American Beauty.

Garcia and Grisman were together again in Old & In the Way, with Garcia on banjo, Grisman on mandolin, Peter Rowan on guitar, John Kahn on bass and, after Richard Greene and John Hartford had each taken a turn, Vassar Clements on fiddle. The group played about 50 shows in 1973 and came back together for a single festival in 1974. Its album, recorded at the Boarding House in San Francisco on 8 October 1973 and released in February 1975, became one of the best-selling bluegrass albums.

The Dead returned to acoustic material on Reckoning, a double album released in April 1981 and recorded live in September and October 1980 at the Warfield Theatre in San Francisco and Radio City Music Hall in New York. Among its songs are “Dark Hollow,” “Rosa Lee McFall,” “Jack-A-Roe,” “Deep Elem Blues” and another “Ripple.” Later in the decade Garcia brought his old bandmates David Nelson and Sandy Rothman into the Jerry Garcia Acoustic Band, with John Kahn, Kenny Kosek and David Kemper; it played concerts in 1987 and 1988, and its live recordings include Almost Acoustic and Ragged but Right, the latter not released until 2010.

From 1991 Garcia and Grisman made duo albums for Acoustic Disc, among them Not for Kids Only (1993) and Shady Grove (1996). The Pizza Tapes, made with Tony Rice at Dawg Studios on 4–5 February 1993, came out in April 2000. The Grateful Dead were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994, the year before Garcia died. On 28 March 2024 the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame & Museum in Owensboro, Kentucky, opened Jerry Garcia: A Bluegrass Journey, a 1,000-square-foot exhibition planned to run for two years, covering his early bluegrass years and his later work with Rice, Grisman and Rowan.