A very Jerry bonus episode explores Jerry Garcia’s early ‘60s years in the Palo Alto folk scene and his progression from guitar strummer to banjo picker during a prodigious half-decade before going electric with the Grateful Dead, including interviews with David Nelson and Bob Matthews, both one-time members of Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions.
Jerry Garcia: American Folkie supplementary notes
By Jesse Jarnow
Much of the music in the American Folkie bonus episode is drawn from the box set Before the Dead, released in 2018 by Round Records, documenting nearly all of Jerry Garcia’s folk era projects before going electric with the Warlocks and, eventually, the Grateful Dead. This version of “Sittin’ On Top of the World” from 1962 is one of my favorite Garcia vocal performances of any era. We also drew on some quotes in Dennis McNally’s Jerry on Jerry, a 5-hour audiobook of interviews with Garcia.
Jerry Garcia was discharged from the Army on December 14th, 1960. His complete military record surfaced online recently, and is viewable here. With his last Army paycheck, he bought a used car and headed south for his new life in Palo Alto.
In 2008, J. Revell Carr did an incredible presentation (at the Grateful Dead Scholars Caucus in Albuquerque) about the influence of fiddler Scotty Stoneman on Jerry Garcia, titled “"I'd Never Heard Anything Like It": Scotty Stoneman and the Bluegrass Roots of Jerry Garcia's Improvisational Approach.” You can listen here, thanks to recordist David Gans.