The Grateful Dead was founded in the San Francisco Bay Area amid the rise of the counterculture of the 1960s. The founding members were Jerry Garcia (lead guitar, vocals), Bob Weir (rhythm guitar, vocals), Ron "Pigpen" McKernan (keyboards, harmonica, vocals), Phil Lesh (bass, vocals), and Bill Kreutzmann (drums). Members of the Grateful Dead had played together in various San Francisco bands, including Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions and the Warlocks. Lesh was the last member to join the Warlocks before they became the Grateful Dead; he replaced Dana Morgan Jr., who had played bass for a few gigs. Drummer Mickey Hart and non-performing lyricist Robert Hunter joined in 1967. With the exception of McKernan, who died in 1973, and Hart, who took time off from 1971 to 1974, the core of the band stayed together for its entire 30-year history. The other official members of the band are Tom Constanten (keyboards; 1968–1970), John Perry Barlow (nonperforming lyricist; 1971–1995), Keith Godchaux (keyboards; 1971–1979), Donna Godchaux (vocals; 1972–1979), Brent Mydland (keyboards, vocals; 1979–1990), and Vince Welnick (keyboards, vocals; 1990–1995). Bruce Hornsby (accordion, piano, vocals) was a touring member from 1990 to 1992, as well as a guest with the band on occasion before and after the tours.
The name "Grateful Dead" was chosen from a dictionary. According to Phil Lesh, "[Jerry Garcia] picked up an old Britannica World Language Dictionary ... [and] ... In that silvery elf-voice he said to me, 'Hey, man, how about the Grateful Dead?'" The definition there was "the soul of a dead person, or his angel, showing gratitude to someone who, as an act of charity, arranged their burial". According to Alan Trist, director of the Grateful Dead's music publisher company Ice Nine, Garcia found the name in the Funk & Wagnalls Folklore Dictionary, when his finger landed on that phrase while playing a game of Fictionary. In the Garcia biography, Captain Trips, author Sandy Troy states that the band was smoking the psychedelic DMT at the time. The term "grateful dead" appears in folktales of a variety of cultures.
Live performances
The Grateful Dead toured constantly throughout their career, playing more than 2,300 concerts. They promoted a sense of community among their fans, who became known as "Deadheads", many of whom followed their tours for months or years on end. Around concert venues, an impromptu communal marketplace known as 'Shakedown Street' was created by Deadheads to serve as centers of activity where fans could buy and sell anything from grilled cheese sandwiches to home-made t-shirts and recordings of Grateful Dead concerts.
In their early career, the band also dedicated their time and talents to their community, the Haight-Ashbury area of San Francisco, making available free food, lodging, music, and health care to all. It has been said that the band performed "more free concerts than any band in the history of music".
With the exception of 1975, when the band was on hiatus and played only four concerts together, the Grateful Dead performed many concerts every year, from their formation in April 1965, until July 9, 1995. Initially all their shows were in California, principally in the San Francisco Bay Area and in or near Los Angeles. They also performed, in 1965 and 1966, with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, as the house band for the Acid Tests. They toured nationally starting in June 1967 (their first foray to New York), with a few detours to Canada, Europe and three nights at the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt in 1978. They appeared at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, the Woodstock Festival in 1969 and the Festival Express train tour across Canada in 1970. They were scheduled to appear as the final act at the infamous Altamont Free Concert on December 6, 1969 after the Rolling Stones but withdrew after security concerns. "That's the way things went at Altamont—so badly that the Grateful Dead, prime organizers and movers of the festival, didn't even get to play", staff at Rolling Stone magazine wrote in a detailed narrative on the event.
Their first UK performance was at the Hollywood Music Festival in 1970. Their largest concert audience came in 1973 when they played, along with the Allman Brothers Band and the Band, before an estimated 600,000 people at the Summer Jam at Watkins Glen. They played to an estimated total of 25 million people, more than any other band, with audiences of up to 80,000 attending a single show. Many of these concerts were preserved in the band's tape vault, and several dozen have since been released on CD and as downloads. The Dead were known for the tremendous variation in their setlists from night to night—the list of songs documented to have been played by the band exceeds 500. The band has released four concert videos under the name View from the Vault.
In the 1990s, the Grateful Dead earned a total of $285 million in revenue from their concert tours, the second-highest during the 1990s, with the Rolling Stones earning the most. This figure is representative of tour revenue through 1995, as touring stopped after the death of Jerry Garcia. In a 1991 PBS documentary, segment host Buck Henry attended an August 1991 concert at Shoreline Amphitheatre and gleaned some information from some band members about the Grateful Dead phenomenon and its success. At the time, Jerry Garcia stated, "We didn't really invent the Grateful Dead, the crowd invented the Grateful Dead, you know what I mean? We were sort of standing in line, and uh, it's gone way past our expectations, way past, so it's, we've been going along with it to see what it's gonna do next." Furthermore, Mickey Hart stated, "This is one of the last places in America that you can really have this kind of fun, you know, considering the political climate and so forth." Hart also stated that "the transformative power of the Grateful Dead is really the essence of it; it's what it can do to your consciousness. We're more into transportation than we are into music, per se, I mean, the business of the Grateful Dead is transportation." One of the band's largest concerts took place just months before Garcia's death — at their outdoor show with Bob Dylan in Highgate, Vermont on June 15, 1995. The crowd was estimated to be over 90,000; overnight camping was allowed and about a third of the audience got in without having purchased a ticket.
Their numerous studio albums were generally collections of new songs that they had first played in concert. The band was also famous for its extended musical improvisations, having been described as having never played the same song the same way twice. Their concert sets often blended songs, one into the next, often for more than three songs at a time.
Tapes
Like several other bands during this time, the Grateful Dead allowed their fans to record their shows. For many years the tapers set up their microphones wherever they could, and the eventual forest of microphones became a problem for the sound crew. Eventually, this was solved by having a dedicated taping section located behind the soundboard, which required a special "tapers" ticket. The band allowed sharing of their shows, as long as no profits were made on the sale of the tapes.
Of the approximately 2,350 shows the Grateful Dead played, almost 2,200 were taped, and most of these are available online. The band began collecting and cataloging tapes early on and Dick Latvala was their keeper. "Dick's Picks" is named after Latvala. After his death in 1999, David Lemieux gradually took the post. Concert set lists from a subset of 1,590 Grateful Dead shows were used to perform a comparative analysis between how songs were played in concert and how they are listened online by Last.fm members. In their book Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead: What Every Business Can Learn From the Most Iconic Band in History, David Meerman Scott and Brian Halligan identify the taper section as a crucial contributor to increasing the Grateful Dead's fan base.
After the death of Garcia in 1995, former members of the band, along with other musicians, toured as the Other Ones in 1998, 2000, and 2002, and the Dead in 2003, 2004, and 2009. In 2015, the four surviving core members marked the band's 50th anniversary in a series of concerts that were billed as their last performances together. There have also been several spin-offs featuring one or more core members, such as Dead & Company, Furthur, the Rhythm Devils, Phil Lesh and Friends, RatDog, and Billy & the Kids.
Brown-Eyed Women
Grateful Dead Lyrics
Jump to: Overall Meaning ↴ Line by Line Meaning ↴
Take up the yoke and plow the fiends around
Gone are the days when the ladies said' "Please
Gentle Jack Jones won't you come to me"
Brown-eyed women and red grenadine
The bottle was dusty but the liquor was clean
Sound of the thunder with the rain pourin' down
And it looks like the old man's gettin' on
1930 when the wall caved in, he paved his way selling red-eyed gin
Brown-eyed women and red grenadine
The bottle was dusty but the liquor was clean
Sound of the thunder with the rain pourin' down
And it looks like the old man's gettin' on
Delilah Jones was the mother of twins
Two times over and the rest were sins
Raised eight boys, only I turned bad
Didn't get the lickin's that the other ones had
Brown-eyed women and red grenadine
The bottle was dusty but the liquor was clean
Sound of the thunder with the rain pourin' down
And it looks like the old man's gettin' on
Tumble down shack on Big Foot country
Snowed so hard that the roof caved in
Delilah Jones went to meet her God
And the old man never was the same again
Daddy made whiskey and he made it well
Cost two dollars and it burned like hell
I cut hick'ry just to fire the still
Drink down a bottle and be ready to kill
Brown-eyed women and red grenadine
The bottle was dusty but the liquor was clean
Sound of the thunder with the rain pourin' down
And it looks like the old man's gettin' on
Gone are the days when the ox fall down
Take up the yoke and plow the fiends around
Gone are the days when the ladies said' "Please
Gentle Jack Jones won't you come to me"
Brown-eyed women and red grenadine
The bottle was dusty but the liquor was clean
Sound of the thunder with the rain pourin' down
And it looks like the old man's gettin' on
The Grateful Dead's song Brown Eyed Women tells the story of a man's life, with all its ups and downs, through the memories of a narrator. The song's first verse describes the past when oxen were used to plow the fields and gentle Jack Jones was sought out by ladies. The second verse refers to the singer's father and his whiskey making, and how he would cut hickory just to fire the still. The chorus repeatedly mentions "brown-eyed women and red grenadine," suggesting a longing for days gone by and perhaps a deeper sense of loss. The third verse is about Delilah Jones, a mother of eight boys, one of whom turned bad. Her death in a snowstorm leaves the old man forever changed. The final verse brings us back to the present, when the days of oxen and the ladies' pleas are gone.
The song is a commentary on the passage of time and the inevitability of change. The lyrics use references to alcohol and women to capture a sense of nostalgia for a simpler time that may never have existed. The repeated mention of "brown-eyed women and red grenadine" creates a dreamlike imagery of the past, a time without responsibility or worry. However, the reality of life is that things change and people die, leaving those left behind to reflect on what was.
Line by Line Meaning
Gone are the days when the ox fall down
The past is gone when the oxen would just collapse; we must now use the yoke to control them and plow the field
Take up the yoke and plow the fiends around
We must step up and take responsibility by using the yoke to control the stubborn oxen and plow the field
Gone are the days when the ladies said' 'Please Gentle Jack Jones won't you come to me'
The times are changing, and women are no longer begging for the attention of men like Gentle Jack Jones
Brown-eyed women and red grenadine, The bottle was dusty but the liquor was clean
The women with beautiful brown eyes are the company that makes the sweet red grenadine taste even better, despite the dusty bottle and the cleanly liquor
Sound of the thunder with the rain pourin' down, And it looks like the old man's gettin' on
The sound of the storm amplifies the sense of aging and deteriorating one's health
1920 when he stepped to the bar, drank to the dregs of the whiskey jar
In 1920, the man enjoyed a drink of the remnants of the whiskey jar
1930 when the wall caved in, he paved his way selling red-eyed gin
By the 1930s, the man had become a bootlegger selling his signature red-eyed gin after an incident where a wall collapsed
Delilah Jones was the mother of twins, Two times over and the rest were sins, Raised eight boys, only I turned bad, Didn't get the lickin's that the other ones had
Delilah Jones gave birth to twins twice, and the other children were a result of her sins. The artist of the song is one of the eight boys but acted poorly despite not receiving as much discipline as the others
Tumble down shack on Big Foot country, Snowed so hard that the roof caved in, Delilah Jones went to meet her God, And the old man never was the same again
In a rundown shack in a country inhabited by Big Foot, the snow caused the roof to collapse and resulted in the death of Delilah Jones. This event caused a significant change in the old man's life
Daddy made whiskey and he made it well, Cost two dollars and it burned like hell, I cut hick'ry just to fire the still, Drink down a bottle and be ready to kill
The artist's father was a skilled whiskey-maker whose product sold well for two dollars despite being difficult to drink. The artist had to collect hickory in order to fuel the still, and once the drink was consumed, it caused aggression
Gone are the days when the ox fall down, Take up the yoke and plow the fiends around, Gone are the days when the ladies said' 'Please Gentle Jack Jones won't you come to me'
The repetition of the chorus acknowledges the change in times and the need to move forward in life
Lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group, Warner Chappell Music, Inc.
Written by: JEROME J. GARCIA, ROBERT C. HUNTER
Lyrics Licensed & Provided by LyricFind
1978garfield
This is the the song that made me fall in love with The Grateful Dead.
My mom was a grad student at a university.
During the summer I would ride in with her and she would take me to the library.
One floor had a bunch of record players and the library had an impressive vinyl collection.
I would go to the card catalog and write down the numbers of the records I wanted to listen to that day.
I remember they had Hendrix, Janis Joplin and others as well as the What a Long Strange Trip it's Been Grateful Dead compilation 2 album set. (Later I discovered much of that set was taken from Europe '72)
I would explore other albums but once I found them the Dead got checked out every time.
Mom would leave me with my stack of vinyl and I would spend the day listening to music.
I had heard and liked Truckin' and Casey Jones on the radio along with Touch of Grey and Hell In a Bucket so I knew who the dead were.
This song made me love them.
My dad played bass in a few country bands over the years.
Nothing he did sounded like "The Phil Zone".
That bass line was a symphony on it's own.
Combined with Jerry's vocals and guitar and the rest of the group's contributions I could not help but become one of the younger Dead Heads.
We lost mom to lung cancer a few years ago (she never smoked).
She had the most beautiful and expressive brown eyes.
This song makes me think of her and remember that she would take time out of her day to set me up with a stack of records along with the million other selfless things she did as I was growing up.
She can not come to me but I will go to her some point in the future.
Here is hoping wherever we wind up has at least as good as vinyl collection as that college library.
If anyone reads this thanks.
I still miss my mom every day.
She was the best person I have ever known and I try to live my life so that if she is watching she is proud or at least not too embarrassed.
John Marks
My pops exposed me to these timeless tunes when I was 5, he's a fundamentalist Christian. I exposed my daughter to it in utero. I have met all kinds of all walks and beliefs tenuously, but inseperately attached by the music. Our people.
Timeless is one word that sums up the music that is essentially the soundtrack of my life. Certain songs bring back memories of traveling all over this this planet in search of all the beauty this world has to offer, but I've most often found that beauty all across America catylized by music and hundreds or thousands of people who I still consider a true friends even though we only spent a week together a decade or two ago.
Many songs bring back the emotion of the worst down and out times of my life. I remember where I was listening to songs like this with my people who are no longer on this Earth.
But there's songs like Ripple, US Blues, Jack a Row, Dire Wolf and others good for enlightenment on any occasion. Ripple is simply pure sun light. My daughter whose almost 4 knows every word of the first chorus.
Places this music takes me also include the darkest times of my life. Those times define who I am today and I would trade for nothing.
US Blues is always good when Uncle Sam rips me off, hassles me, uses law enforcement to terrorize the poor and youth of this nation, and constantly sticks his nose in my business. Yet is somehow funny, when you're laughing about getting a $200 fine.
Jack a Row is fast paced and tells a timeless story while Dire Wolf has a sick chorus and is poetically comical.
All ages can equally love such beauty, whether your 60, or pushing 40 like me, or my three year old daughter. That embodies the definition of timeless.
Best of luck to you and yours, but especially too our adopted family of The Dead all over this beautiful country and world that took us in with open arms in the name of music, nothing more nothing less.
Kevin Gough
Gone are the days when the ox fall down,
Take up the yoke and plow the fields around.
Gone are the days when the ladies said' "Please,
Gentle Jack Jones won't you come to me."
Brown-eyed women and red grenadine,
The bottle was dusty but the liquor was clean.
Sound of the thunder with the rain pouring down,
And it looks like the old man's getting on.
1929 when he stepped to the bar, drank to the dregs of the whiskey jar.
1930 when the wall caved in, he made his way selling red-eyed gin.
Brown-eyed women and red grenadine,
The bottle was dusty but the liquor was clean.
Sound of the thunder with the rain pouring down,
And it looks like the old man's getting on.
Delilah Jones was the mother of twins,
Two times over and the rest were sins.
Raised eight boys, only I turned bad,
Didn't get the lickin's that the other ones had.
Brown-eyed women and red grenadine,
The bottle was dusty but the liquor was clean.
Sound of the thunder with the rain pouring down,
And it looks like the old man's getting on.
Tumble down shack in Big Foot county.
Snowed so hard that the roof caved in.
Delilah Jones went to meet her God,
And the old man never was the same again.
Daddy made whiskey and he made it well.
Cost two dollars and it burned like hell.
I cut hickory just to fire the still,
Drink down a bottle and be ready to kill.
Brown-eyed women and red grenadine,
The bottle was dusty but the liquor was clean.
Sound of the thunder with the rain pouring down,
And it looks like the old man's getting on.
Gone are the days when the ox fall down,
Take up the yoke and plow the fields around.
Gone are the days when the ladies said' "Please,
Gentle Jack Jones won't you come to me."
Brown-eyed women and red grenadine,
The bottle was dusty but the liquor was clean.
Sound of the thunder with the rain pourin' down
1978garfield
This is the the song that made me fall in love with The Grateful Dead.
My mom was a grad student at a university.
During the summer I would ride in with her and she would take me to the library.
One floor had a bunch of record players and the library had an impressive vinyl collection.
I would go to the card catalog and write down the numbers of the records I wanted to listen to that day.
I remember they had Hendrix, Janis Joplin and others as well as the What a Long Strange Trip it's Been Grateful Dead compilation 2 album set. (Later I discovered much of that set was taken from Europe '72)
I would explore other albums but once I found them the Dead got checked out every time.
Mom would leave me with my stack of vinyl and I would spend the day listening to music.
I had heard and liked Truckin' and Casey Jones on the radio along with Touch of Grey and Hell In a Bucket so I knew who the dead were.
This song made me love them.
My dad played bass in a few country bands over the years.
Nothing he did sounded like "The Phil Zone".
That bass line was a symphony on it's own.
Combined with Jerry's vocals and guitar and the rest of the group's contributions I could not help but become one of the younger Dead Heads.
We lost mom to lung cancer a few years ago (she never smoked).
She had the most beautiful and expressive brown eyes.
This song makes me think of her and remember that she would take time out of her day to set me up with a stack of records along with the million other selfless things she did as I was growing up.
She can not come to me but I will go to her some point in the future.
Here is hoping wherever we wind up has at least as good as vinyl collection as that college library.
If anyone reads this thanks.
I still miss my mom every day.
She was the best person I have ever known and I try to live my life so that if she is watching she is proud or at least not too embarrassed.
Kenneth
Props to all our mothers my friends
jeffrey winding
God bless your mom
Chris Vickers
What a lovely tribute to your Mom. It brings tears to my eyes. 💔
Brian Edwards
This is genuinely one of the, if not the most wholesome and heartwarming comment I've had the pleasure of reading on YouTube. Thank you for sharing.
Trey Bratcher
Who else feels like this music is just like the rays of the sun, it warms you all the way to the soul
gary tassi
Just what I was thinking too, always makes my day better.
Gerlinde Rosensteiner
Turn on the dead and feel good!
Lima Romeo
It feels like a relaxing summer day
4estfloor
Trey Bratcher It was from a time when people were operating at a different frequency, Literally.