Grateful dead songbook bdf12/24/2023 ![]() ![]() Just a knack, but it’s small wonder that my songs are often fraught with allusions. I also absorbed the lyrics to an untold number of folk songs during the folk revival of the sixties. I knew the words to most of the popular songs of the forties and fifties and to most of the classics of the swing era, through my parents’ record collection (also strong in folk music) and through playing through “fake books” of the era on my trumpet. My particular strength was a good memory. Several of us were veterans of regular jazz sessions by sterling musicians such as Lester Hellum, Bob Pringle, Rudy Jackson, and Dan Barnett while living at the Chateau. Mickey Hart was a titled world-champion rudimental drummer from a family of drummers and studied Indian rhythmic intricacies with Zakir Hussein and Ali Akbar Khan. Garcia’s knowledge and facility with American folk forms and instrumental styles was compendious. Phil studied composition with the great Italian avant-garde composer Luciano Berio to augment his classical training. Pigpen played blues and was accepted as a regular in the black nightclubs of East Palo Alto in his early teens. Most bands can be copied, but bands that have tried to mimic the Grateful Dead in a creative way, other than note-by-note reproduction, tend to fall short of the mark because there is no specific style to mimic, rather a range of styles that the band members have individually mastered and integrated into the music. But jazz wasn’t talking to pop, and bluegrass wasn’t talking to the blues-experimental postclassic soundscape wasn’t talking to anybody. My own improbable dream was to aid and abet a unified indigenous American, or at least Western, music, drawing on all bona fide traditional currents including pop. I’m optimistically uncertain as to whether it is a dead issue or a ticking time bomb set to detonate long after its progenitors have quit this sphere of commercial sorrow. Its verbal and musical complexity offer little of overwhelming market value to a more intensely stratified current musical culture. It was, in its day, as shockingly innovative as the music of mounting urban psychosis that was to displace it. But it bears mentioning that our work was a natural and inevitable blending of rock and roll, jazz, and traditional folk culture. It begins to appear that our output embodied the summation and close of a musical era, rather than heralding the bright new beginning devoutly wished for. The songlist of the Grateful Dead has achieved an anomalous status within the archives of current pop culture. There are as many ways as there are listeners. There is more than one way to love a song. When scholars hear a song they like, they annotate it. Hat, after all, is the point of a compendium of scatology and ontology viz the lyrics of the Grateful Dead? When fans hear a song they like, they internalize it, dance to it, sing along. The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics Foreword Now I’ll never have to explain myself.” Excerpt In fact, founding band member Bob Weir said: “This book is great. ![]() A gorgeous keepsake edition of the Dead’s official annotated lyrics, The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics is an absolute must-have for the fiftieth anniversary-you won’t think of this cultural icon the same way again. ![]() Including essays by Dead lyricists Robert Hunter and John Perry and Jim Carpenter’s original illustrations, whimsical elements in the lyrics are brought to light, showcasing the American legend that is present in so many songs. And the annotations on sources provide a gloss on the lyrics, which goes to the roots of Western culture as they are incorporated into them.Īn avid Grateful Dead concertgoer for more than two decades, David Dodd is a librarian who brings to the work a detective’s love of following a clue as far as it will take him. How do they do all this? To provide a context for this formidable body of work, of which his part is primary, Robert Hunter has written a foreword that goes to the heart of the matter. They are hummed and spoken among thousands as counterculture code and recorded by musicians of all stripes for their inimitable singability and obscure accessibility. These are some of the best-loved songs in the modern American songbook. ![]() The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics is an authoritative text, providing standard versions of all the original songs you thought you knew forwards and backwards. Celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the most popular and enduring band ever: “Even the most hardcore Deadheads will be impressed by this obsessively complete look at the Grateful Dead’s lyrics” ( Publishers Weekly). ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |