Grateful Dead

In the fall of 1962, a twenty-year-old Garcia booked studio time at Stanford's KZSU with a short-lived bluegrass quintet, the Hart Valley Drifters, and cut two Earl Scruggs tunes note for note, three years before the Grateful Dead existed. He'd already explained why: "I heard Earl Scruggs play five-string banjo and I thought, that's something I have to be able to do," he said. "I fell in love with the sound and I started earnestly trying to do exactly what I was hearing. That became the basis for everything else — that was my model." The three-finger roll he chased on banjo, he simply carried over to guitar.

listen: upstream & heresource: Relix/JamBands.com — "Earl Scruggs (1924-2012)" (Garcia's 1994 quote on discovering Scruggs) ↗share

1949

Foggy Mountain BreakdownEarl Scruggs

→↓

1970

Uncle John's BandGrateful Dead

listen forCue up Flatt and Scruggs's "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" and listen to Scruggs's right hand: the accents land just ahead of the beat, notes rolling forward instead of falling flat on it. That same anticipation turns up in the acoustic intro to "Uncle John's Band," where Garcia picks a syncopated, forward-rolling pattern that owes less to any rock or folk guitarist than to three-finger banjo technique — a Scruggs roll, transplanted string for string onto six strings instead of five.

Phil Lesh never hedged on this one. "The Coltrane Quartet and the long jams they would do in one chord was a defining factor for us because it was a demonstration that this could be done," he said. "There's so much room inside this one chord... Believe me, that was a major influence on us." In his memoir, Lesh wrote that he pushed the rest of the band to study how Coltrane's quartet could stretch a simple structure like "My Favorite Things" far past its written length — and the technique landed almost immediately in "Viola Lee Blues," the song where the Dead first let one chord run wild.

listen: upstream & hereshare

1961

My Favorite ThingsJohn Coltrane

→↓

1967

Viola Lee BluesGrateful Dead

listen forOn "My Favorite Things," Coltrane's quartet holds a single vamp for minutes on end, pianist McCoy Tyner's chords circling under solo after solo that never resolves anywhere else. "Viola Lee Blues" runs the same trick on a jug-band blues: the Dead lock onto one chord and just keep opening it wider, building and receding for most of ten minutes before the song's theme even returns — the stretch Lesh credited directly to Coltrane, played out at rock volume.

According to Phil Lesh, Pigpen was never happier than "with a bottle of wine and a guitar... playing Lightnin' Hopkins songs, and doing Lord Buckley routines" — the blues he already lived before there was a band to join. Garcia told Lesh it had been Pigpen's own idea to turn the pre-Dead jug group Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions into an electric blues outfit, so he could play the music he'd grown up on. "When the band turned into the Grateful Dead," Lesh wrote, "Pig became our keel, our roots, our fundamental tone."

listen: upstream & heresource: dead.net — official band bio, Ron "Pigpen" McKernan (Lightnin' Hopkins named as Pigpen's formative influence) ↗share

1946

Katie MaeLightnin' Hopkins

→↓

1970

Katie MaeGrateful Dead

listen forHopkins's "Katie Mae" rides on his talking-blues drawl and a loose, behind-the-beat guitar shuffle, following his own voice rather than any fixed meter. Pigpen's live reading of the same song, cut with the band at the Fillmore East in February 1970, keeps that unhurried, conversational phrasing intact even with a full electric band underneath him — the blues-shouter cadence Pigpen carried from his teenage record collection straight onto the stage.