Jerry Garcia - David Grisman Quartet at Sweetwater, December 17, 1990

Perfect soundboard audio of the debut of the Garcia-Grisman band (JGDG) at Sweetwater in Mill Valley came into the light a few weeks back.

It has now been sync'd to video and Christopher Hazard has worked his 4k wizardry on it.

Thanks to all involved in doing this work. We have an absolute gem of a copy of pivotal addition to Jerry's late life.

You Know What's Crazy? I Have Never Listening-Noted a Garcia-Grisman Gig

So I will do the January 12-13, 1994 Warfield shows together.

The performances are delightful, and I don't have tons of comments at that level. They play a number of rarities which had been relatively recently released on Not For Kids Only (Acoustic Disc ACD 9, 1993), and I am a huge fan of that record, which was recently remastered and topped-up with some bonus tracks. The first two tunes on the record are "Jenny Jenkins" and "Freight Train", which I played a LOT for my kiddos and which are both burned into my DNA. JJ kicks off set II of the first night, while Freight Train, which had gotten a one-off breakout with JGB on 11/3/93, happens in set II of night two. Merle Travis's coal miner's lament "Dark As A Dungeon" was a real highlight for me - I recommend it via the video of 1/12/94. But, really, I have to say that I love every single song they played.

There is no banjo playing at these shows, and I think at least "Stealin'" and "Jenny Jenkins" are done as David and Jerry duets.

Set I the second night is quite short, about 36 minutes. Some number of those minutes come out of the great Garcia-Grisman composition "Grateful Dawg", which clocks in here at a mere three-and-a-half minutes. I don't have specific timing for earlier versions, but I want to say they might have gone 6 or 7 or more.

I do want to provide a little repertorial analysis to illustrate the range of (mostly) American musics from which Jerry and David drew, and to which they contributed in turn. Some data next.

I am wide open to suggestions about this set of classifications. In particular, I have in my mind a genre called country blues which I guess is black acoustic, but, again, I don't really know what I am talking about. I have only just come to understand what a standard is. The next table summarizes the shows by genre.

I guess the main take-home from this little exercise is that the first night was a little more contemporary, while the second was a little more traditional. Anything else jump out at you?

Anyway, totally wonderful to listen to these. I was responsible for the earliest seeds of these two shows, which were not very good. Then they were remastered by someone else, not very well. While a bunch of other sources for 1/13 have come about, 1/12 was only very recently upgraded from the recording annotated here, pulled by Steve Fink. So we now have very good tapes from both nights, and they are worth your ear time.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

LN jg1994-01-12.jgdg.all.aud-Fink.150311.flac1648

Jerry Garcia and David Grisman

The Warfield

982 Market Street

San Francisco, CA 94102

January 12, 1994 (Wednesday) - 8 PM

Fink MAD shnid-150311

--set I (9 tracks, 8 tunes, 47:35)--

s1t01. Teddy Bears' Picnic [4:52] [0:53]

s1t02. Jack-A-Roe [4:32] [1:07]

s1t03. Dark As A Dungeon [7:12] [0:18]

s1t04. Bow Wow [5:19] [0:05]

s1t05. ambience [1:28]

s1t06. Two Soldiers [4:20] -> 

s1t07. Friend Of The Devil [6:57] [0:05]

s1t08. Louis Collins [5:20] [0:19]

s1t09. (1) [0:39] Stealin' [3:59] [0:11]

--set II (12 tracks, 9 tunes, 62:38)--

s2t10. ambience [0:48]

s2t11. Jenny Jenkins [4:50 [0:05]

s2t12. Walkin' Boss [7:16] [0:06]

s2t13. When First Unto This Country [4:32]

s2t14. ambience [1:43]

s2t15. Milestones [8:30] [0:15]

s2t16. Sitting In Limbo [9:21]

s2t17. ambience [1:02]

s2t18. Russian Lullaby [6:37] ->

s2t19. I Ain't Never [3:10] [0:32]

s2t20. Bag's Groove [9:22] ->

s2t21. Ripple [4:11] (2) [0:18]

! ACT1: Jerry Garcia and David Grisman

! lineup: Jerry Garcia - acoustic guitar, vocals;

! lineup: David Grisman - mandolin, vocals;

! lineup: Jim Kerwin - acoustic bass;

! lineup: Joe Craven - fiddle, percussion.

JGMF:

! Recording: symbols: % = recording discontinuity; / = clipped song; // = cut song; ... = fade in/out; # = truncated timing; [m:ss] = recorded event time. The recorded event time immediately after the song or item name is an attempt at getting the "real" time of the event. So, a timing of [m:ss] right after a song title is an attempt to say how long the song really was, as represented on this recording.

! Jerrybase: https://jerrybase.com/events/19940112-01

! db: https://etreedb.org/shn/11169 (shnf); https://etreedb.org/shn/30691 (loy remaster of shnid-11169); https://etreedb.org/shn/150311 (this fileset)

! map: https://goo.gl/maps/ZW52vfHTbjs

! JGBP: http://jerrygarciasbrokendownpalaces.blogspot.com/2013/02/warfield-982-market-street-san.html

! venue: http://hooterollin.blogspot.com/2011/11/september-25-1980-fox-warfield-theater.html

! video: URL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VTwaV4FQ2s

! setlist: Old data, based on attendee recollections, had Stealin' as the first song of set II, but the recordings clearly reveal it to be in set I. Similarly, Ripple as given as an encore, but continuous tape from Bag's Groove belies this idea.

! R: field recordist: Steve Fink

! R: field recording gear: 2x Neumann KM54 > DAP-20

! R: field recording location: drink rail

! R: lineage: DAT Archived and Transferred by Stucco; Mastering by Jamie Waddell 16bit/48kHz FLAC. Originally shared at www.shnflac.net in celebration of the 15th birthday of our website June 25, 2020 **gems** team.

! R: My goodness, this tape dramatically improves on the only previously circulating version. So clear!

! P: s1t03 DAAD Wow! Garcia is giving this real feeling. 

! song: "Dark As A Dungeon" (s1t03): Public debut. Amazing that he is doing this tune, written by country legend Merle Travis. So freaking great!

! song: "Bow Wow" (s1t04): Public debut. Dawg original.

! s1t09 (1) DG: "[inaudible] send this out to my little boy, Samson Eli, who's four years old today. [inaudible]"

! personnel: I think Stealin' and Jenny Jenkins are done in duet.

! P: s2t12 WB Jerry takes a feature second half of 2 that, to me, has some tempo issues and occasional picking dysfluency. Again late 4 tempo wobbles, and where JG needs to pick and sustain some notes in his dialogue with David, I don't hear the sustain. This version is not as together as the versions from three years earlier.

! P: s2t15 Milestones JG takes first feature 0:45ff. Playing well. Grisman is doing some powerful stuff in the 3 minute range, the crowd responds appropriately @3:10. Just killing! Kerwin features next, building up during 4. Craven percussion feature 5:25ff. 6:15ff Dawg and Jer are sort of trading licks, then 6:35 to the theme.

! P: s2t16 SIL gets off to a rough start, everyone a little out of sync, Jerry garbles the opening verse. Still 3 minutes in, everyone is not together on this. A little better later on in the tune. 7 Jerry digs in a little deeper, does some Caribbean guitar (not inappropriately).

! s2t21 (2) sounds like there's a "thanks a lot"

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

LN jg1994-01-13.jgdg.all.aud-Fink.150310.flac1648

Jerry Garcia and David Grisman

The Warfield

982 Market Street

San Francisco, CA 94102

January 13, 1994 (Thursday) - 8 PM

Fink MAD shnid-150310

--set I (8 tracks, 35:59-:12)

s1t01. //Shady Grove [#3:05] [0:31]

s1t02. Long Black Veil [5:03] [0:46]

s1t03. Rosa Lee McFall [3:28] 0:33]

s1t04. Dawg's Waltz [5:00] [0:11]

s1t05. Freight Train [4:52] [0:20]

s1t06. Hot Corn, Cold Corn [4:28] [0:18]

s1t07. Red Rocking Chair [3:24] [0:14]

s1t08. Grateful Dawg [3:28] [0:06] % pre-set II [0:12]

--set II (12 tracks, 9 tunes, 70:00+:12-6:01)--

09. Trouble In Mind [4:14] [0:14]

10. Ballad Of Casey Jones [4:34] [0:17]

11. There Ain't No Bugs On Me [4:41]

12. ambience (1) [0:59]

13. So What? [10:04] [0:11]

14. Rockin' Chair [7:31]

15. ambience [1:17]

16. Stealin' [3:50] [0:34]

17. Little Glass Of Wine [3:44] [0:13]

18. Drink Up And Go Home [2:55] [0:11]

19. Arabia [18:31]

20. ambience (2) [6:01]

! ACT1: Jerry Garcia and David Grisman

! lineup: Jerry Garcia - acoustic guitar, vocals;

! lineup: David Grisman - mandolin, vocals;

! lineup: Jim Kerwin - acoustic bass;

! lineup: Joe Craven - fiddle, percussion.

JGMF:

! Recording: symbols: % = recording discontinuity; / = clipped song; // = cut song; ... = fade in/out; # = truncated timing; [m:ss] = recorded event time. The recorded event time immediately after the song or item name is an attempt at getting the "real" time of the event. So, a timing of [m:ss] right after a song title is an attempt to say how long the song really was, as represented on this recording.

! Jerrybase: https://jerrybase.com/events/19940113-01

! db: https://etreedb.org/shn/11331 (shnf); https://etreedb.org/shn/30692 (loy remaster shnid-11331); https://etreedb.org/shn/32833 (Neumann); https://etreedb.org/shn/82760 (Neumann); https://etreedb.org/shn/85644 (Litzenberger flac1648); https://etreedb.org/shn/94690 (Litzenberger flac); https://etreedb.org/shn/150310 (this fileset).

! map: https://goo.gl/maps/ZW52vfHTbjs

! JGBP: http://jerrygarciasbrokendownpalaces.blogspot.com/2013/02/warfield-982-market-street-san.html

! venue: http://hooterollin.blogspot.com/2011/11/september-25-1980-fox-warfield-theater.html

! R: field recordist: Steve Fink

! R: field recording gear: 2x Neumann KM54 > DAP-20

! R: field recording location: drink rail

! R: lineage: DAT Archived and Transferred by Stucco; Mastering by Jamie Waddell 16bit/48kHz FLAC. Originally shared at www.shnflac.net in celebration of the 15th birthday of our website June 25, 2020 **gems** team.

! R: s1t01 Shady Grove cuts in on "wish I had a banjo string"

! R: seeder notes. Set One was recorded much louder, and the crowd cheers clip between songs, but not the music at all. Both Sets of music match volume wise now, I did what I could to unclip the crowd between songs Set One

! P: s1t05 FT he pulls this off just about perfectly. So nice.

! P: s1t08 GD is a fucking killer song, but look at how short this version is! Three and a half minutes?

! s2t12 (1) DG: "The man on the bass - Jim Kerwin. On the fiddle, and on the fiddle case - Joe Craven." JG: "That's David 'Dawg' Grisman playing the mandolin." DG: "Captain Trips here on the guitar [inaudible]."

! s2t20 (2) Some interesting taper talk at the end about a fan who had too much fun

Not For Kids Only Deluxe (Acoustic Disc DLACD-09, 2020)

https://acousticdisc.com/product/jerry-garcia-and-david-grisman-not-for-kids-only-download/

This happened without my noticing at the time (whenever it was in that accursed year, just passed, that shall not be named). But Acoustic Disc has remastered the Not For Kids Only (Acoustic Disc ACD 9, 1993), added four bonus tracks, and offered it up for download. I am spinning the high-def (24bit / 96 kHz) version now, and it sounds gobsmackingly great. (The original did, too - tip o' the cap to "Decibel" Dave Dennison.)

The unreleased tracks (alt. takes of Jenny Jenkins, Three Men Went A-Hunting, Teddy Bears’ Picnic, and There Ain’t No Bugs On Me) are Jerry-David duets. Alas, they are undated. I will try to see if AD will answer a query as to the dates. Let me say here that Grisman and Garcia are too important as American musicians, and this material is too important as American music, not to give it the jazz treatment, with full metadata. I have never understood why they hold things like the dates close to the vest.

Anyway, happy listening!

Purty

Woody's Rag

For years, I have wanted to know the name of the second song from the first "real" live Garcia-Grisman gig, 2/2/91 at the Warfield, which has previously just been identified as "Instrumental". They played it again the next night, and they would never play it publicly again.

Well, the great Neil V. Rosenberg, whose book Bluegrass: A History, is totally essential, has sent along an identification. It's "Woody's Rag", written by the one and only Woody Guthrie, and done among others by The Weavers.

Thank you, Professor Rosenberg!

Elizabeth Cotten

Elizabeth "Libba" Cotten (née Nevill) (January 5, 1893 – June 29, 1987) was a profoundly original American folk musician, vectoring between the music of isolated early 20^th century North Carolina and the multimodal hypersounds of the present – check her out playing in crystal clear black and white on your youtube. A southpaw church and porch picker, Ms. Cotten played a righty-tuned guitar upside down and sang the folk and blues of a self-possessed and sassy little girl, who are known to come in all genders, ages, and sizes, Scout Finch a few decades earlier and from the unscripted side of town. 

Ms. Cotten's musical family and environs might have foreordained her, but that destiny nearly passed her by. She mostly stopped playing around 1910, when she became a single teenaged mother in Chapel Hill. Then, "In the mid-1940s, [she] chanced to meet composer Ruth Crawford Seeger at a department store. They began to talk, and Seeger soon hired Cotten to work in the Seeger household. It was here that Cotten became motivated to pick up the guitar again" (cite). Mike Seeger recorded her on reel-to-reel tape and projected her through barriers of race, class, gender through the folk revival and into national memory.

Her first record, Folksongs And Instrumentals With Guitar, appeared on Folkways (FG 3526) in 1958 (youtube), and it introduced the world, including eager young white (wannabe or legit) folkies with turntables and a bit of disposable income, to a totally localized and yet probably universally appealing "country ragtime" style and a set of songs like a bracing draw from a cold spring. Cotten's repertoire tapped timeless British Isles-meet-Africana –i.e., American—stock such as "Going Down The Road Feeling Bad", a bunch of honeybabe songs and, of course, "What A Friend We Have In Jesus" (discogs), but her biographic originals are what will slay you.

She was on in years by the time she was "discovered", but this suited her frailing country voice just fine, a spirited gem coming through loud and clear on Folkways vinyl, which rescued many a prospective legend from the obscurity that befell those who never got wire-recorded and waxed in. But it's not just that, it's also the great store of the written word, promising extended-if-not-eternal life for those it picked up and, in the absence of vinyl, utter obscurity for those it missed. "Cut off by the cataclysms of the Great Depression and the Second World War and by a national narrative that had never included their kind," Greil Marcus wrote of many of the musicians appearing on the Harry Smith's Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music (1952), "they appeared now like visitors from another world, like passengers on a ship that had drifted into the sea of the unwritten" (Marcus 1997).

Cotten was double-lucky, because not only was she recorded, but she also found pulp-and-glue permanence when Mike Seeger and John Cohen included two of her originals in their New Lost City Ramblers Songbook (1964).

Garcia fell in love with both "Freight Train" and "Oh Babe, It Ain't No Lie". Both are utterly haunting, based in Ms. Cotton's childhood and expressing a yearning place-boundedness that has been the fate of most everyone who has ever lived, statistically speaking, yet a world that nevertheless can remain alien and estranged. Ms. Cotten explained OBIANL:

That's the song I wrote about a lady who lived next door to us. My mother had to go to work and this lady would teach children. She told my mother something: made my mother punish me. They hurt me all the day. 'Cause I know what she told my mum was not true. That song's 'bout me getting punished. My feelings got hurt, 'cause I did not do what Miss Mary said I did. And I used cry in a bed, and a little verse came to me, a pretty tune came to me, and I made a little song, a little tune I love.

One old woman, Lord, in this town
Keep a-telling her lies on me
Wish to my soul that old woman would die
Keep a-telling her lies on me

Oh babe, it ain't no lie
Oh babe, it ain't no lie
Oh babe, it ain't no lie
You know this life I'm living is [mighty] high

If OBIANL is a wise child's lament at a world dark with injustice, "Freight Train" provides the dream of escape. Ms. Cotten:

We used to watch the freight train. We knew the fireman and the brakeman, and the conductor, my mother used to launder for him. They'd let us ride in the engine, put us in one of the coaches while they were backing up and changing ... That was how I got my first train ride. We used to walk the trestle and put our ear to the track and listen for the train to come. My brother, he'd wait for this train to get real close and then he'd hang down from one of the ties and swing back up after the train had passed over him.

No wonder this one, too, brings ample morbidity – that kind of shit can go really wrong in a hurry.

When I'm dead and in my grave
No more good times here I crave
Place the stones at my head and feet
And tell them all I've gone to sleep

When I die, oh bury me deep
Down at the end of old Chestnut Street
So I can hear old Number Nine
As she comes rolling by

Garcia tried on both tunes for an abortive Arista album project during November 1976 sessions at Elliot Mazer's His Master's Wheels (HMW) Studios (OBIANL features on All Good Things, disc 3, track 11). (For more on the '76 studio work, see.) They would have fit perfectly. OBIANL found the more fulsome later live expression, appearing in every Garcia acoustic configuration of the 1980s, from the Dead's September-October 1980 treatment (immortalized on Reckoning, Arista A2L-8604, April 1981), to Amsterdam with Bobby Weir (10/11/81), Garcia's only solo engagement after 1965 (4/10/82), to the many Garcia-Kahn and Jerry Garcia Acoustic Band (JGAB) gigs later in the decade. "Freight Train" had preceded OBIANL at the solo acoustic show, but Garcia couldn't remember the words and shelved it, as a known and public proposition, for over a decade. He took it back up with Grisman, and it appeared on their Not For Kids Only (Acoustic Disc ACD 9, 1993) chock full of New Lost City Ramblers Song Book chestnuts. By that time, and when it appeared as an acoustic one-off during an electric JGB equipment failure at the Knickberbocker Arena in Albany (11/3/93), but especially on its two 1994 public voyages, the song's lullaby came across a sad Siren's song, a stone being laid at Garcia's own pleading head and feet, buried deep under ol' Chestnut Street.

In response to a fan's concern that the Dead had ripped Elizabeth Cotten off with its "Sugaree" (evoking, as it did, her "Shake Sugaree"), manager Richard Loren said in May 1981 that she was a "great hero" to Garcia (1). When she died, Garcia took to dedicating OBIANL to her memory, the only artist he ever consistently recognized in this way, as far as I know. At many of these shows, these were the only words he spoke to the audience, a testament to the high esteem in which he held her.

! ref: (1) Grateful Dead Archive, MS332, Business Papers, Second Accrual (preliminary), Box 1008.

New Lost City Ramblers Song Book

Seeger, Mike, and John Cohen, eds. 1964. The New Lost City Ramblers Song Book. New York: Oak Books.

Here's a brief list of tunes in the NLCR songbook that Garcia is known to have played. This does not include the Elizabeth Cotten tunes (I have considered them separately) and has not been carefully vetted, since pre-Dead is beyond my ken. Sharp-eyed readers may spot more.

I Truly Understand

When First To This Country

Red Rocking Chair

Little Maggie

Billy Grimes, the Rover

Nine- Pound Hammer

Walking Boss

Hopalong Peter

Man of Constant Sorrow

Hot Corn

Three Men Went A-Hunting

I'll Roll in My Sweet Baby's Arms

Salty Dog Blues

Shady Grove

Crow Black Chicken

Arkansas Traveler

Ain't No Bugs on Me

White House Blues

Note also:

Lady of Carlisle

Hog-eye

Don't Let Your Deal Go Down

I am not saying the NLCR Song Book, records or combination of them was the only source that Garcia would have encountered for lots of these songs – everybody knew and did a bunch of these. In my rummaging around some, well, folkways, I have come across all kinds of "floaters", fragments of idea, characters, narratives, or scenes that appear and reappear throughout the folk tradition. But an awful lot of Garcia et al.'s pre-Dead repertoire is reflected in the NLCR Song Book, a lot more than the Smith Anthology. Whether it was Hunter, Nelson, Leicester, Pigpen, Garcia, any or all of them together, they were certainly drawing from this source.

They'd continue to do so: David Grisman had a copy handy when he and Jerry were working up the material that would appear on Not For Kids Only (Acoustic Disc ACD 9, 1993): of the twelve songs on that release, one of the finest explicitly white roots engagements of Garcia's career, seven figure in the list above (see Smith 1994 for Grisman discussing this). But, really what we see here is the core of Garcia's acoustic repertoire, as played from folkie days before the Dead through Old And In The Way, Great American Music/String Band, Garcia-Kahn, Jerry Garcia Acoustic Band (JGAB), and Garcia-Grisman.

BTW, love these headings: Old Love Songs, Dance Tunes, Take Warning, News & Occupational Hazards, Lonesome Blues, Bible Tales, Wild Men & Murder, Songs, Whoop 'Em Up, Rave On, The Great Depression.