“Friend of the Devil” appeared as the second track on the Grateful Dead’s 1970 acoustic album American Beauty. The lyric is by the Dead’s chief lyricist Robert Hunter, and the music is co-credited to Jerry Garcia and to John “Marmaduke” Dawson, the lead singer of the New Riders of the Purple Sage. According to Hunter’s later accounts, the song came together while he, Dawson, and David Nelson were rehearsing; Hunter had most of the lyric in hand, and Dawson supplied the now-famous line “A friend of the devil is a friend of mine.”
The first live performance was at the Family Dog at the Great Highway in San Francisco on February 28, 1970, several months before the album’s release. David Grisman — an old Garcia friend and a force in the parallel acoustic-bluegrass-experimental scene that shaped American Beauty‘s sound — played mandolin on the studio recording, and the song’s bluegrass-flavoured texture is largely a function of his and Garcia’s acoustic-guitar work.
The lyric is a short outlaw-on-the-run narrative — debt, gambling, two women, a chase across the West — with a devil bargain at the centre that the song never fully resolves. It is among the most-covered Grateful Dead songs, and has been recorded by several bluegrass acts including Rice, Rice, Hillman & Pedersen and Rob Ickes & Trey Hensley.
