Customer Reviews

Roots of the Grateful Dead

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There is some excellent and varied music here which should set the enquiring Dead enthusiasist down a rewarding path of musical exploration of country and blues, jug bands, yodellers and the fascinating cross-fertilising of all these fields.

As a scholarly treatise, though, it falls somewhat flat, partly due to the skimpy and under researched liner notes, but mainly because the Grateful Dead links to some of these recordings is somewhat tenuous, even allowing for the fuller album title that appears on the front cover, The Roots Of The Grateful Dead And Jerry Garcia. A number of the songs here have a connection only to Jerry Garcia.

The Dead's version of the first track, Sitting On Top Of The World, for example, owes far more to Bill Monroe's 1957 recording than to the Mississippi Sheiks and was originally learned from a version by Carl Perkins. Similarly, their It Hurts Me Too was based on the Elmore James revival, Good Morning Little School should be the version by Smokey Hogg, Walkin' Blues should be Robert Johnson, and so on. Most clangingly, the Dead's Casey Jones on Workingman's Dead was an original Garcia/Hunter song about the 1900 train crash involving John Luther "Casey" Jones and is not "a version of Kassie Jones" by Furry Lewis as the liner notes say.

The Stanley Brothers' The Fields Have Turned Brown, from 1950 the most recent recording in the collection, has not been recorded either by the Dead or by Jerry Garcia (though he did sing and play on a recording by Bluegrass Reunion in 1992).

Some recording details are given in the notes but often leave one guessing as to the year, or, as in the case of the Mississippi Sheiks or the Cannon's Jug Stompers, which version has been included. None of this detracts from the music, of course, but could have been so much more in the hands of a real Grateful Dead enthusiast

this is a great collection of sides. Nicely remastered jug band, blues and early country tunes covered by the Dead. Would make a nice Roots Music 101 disc for the uninitiated.

"The Roots of the Grateful Dead (& Jerry Garcia)" reaches far back into the Americana song book. This disc features original or earlier versions of songs that have been canonized by the Grateful Dead and various incarnations of Jerry Garcia. Many Pig Pen tunes are here like 'Katie Mae,' 'It Hurts Me Too' and 'Good Morning Little School Girl.' While the disc features a balance of songs that are immediately recognizable like 'Sitting On Top Of The World' and 'Casey Jones,' many tunes are obscure like 'Louis Collins' and 'Spike Driver's Blues.' Indeed, those not familiar with Jerry Garcia's bluegrass efforts will not recognize about one quarter of the material. While the disc can easily be appreciated by any listener of early American music, "the Roots of the Grateful Dead" accomplishes its goal in connecting fans of the Dead with the original versions of favorites. The obvious comparison for this recording is "the Music Never Stopped: Roots of the Grateful Dead." The scope of "the Music Never Stopped" doesn't go back as far as "Roots of the Dead" and is therefore much more accessible. Keeping this in mind, "the Roots of the Grateful Dead" should be a sophomore selection when seeking the origins of Jerry and the Dead.