Happy 55th Anniversary to the Grateful Dead’s fourth studio album Workingman’s Dead, originally released June 14, 1970.
The Grateful Dead have made many contributions to popular music. They (and their fan network) popularized tape trading, a word-of-mouth music sharing system that still allows bands to grow without radio airplay. Their sprawling, unpredictable, improvisational concerts led their fans to start following them on tour, creating one of the strongest early fan communities in rock and roll. Although they didn’t use the term, their show format essentially gave birth to the now-prolific jamband scene, paving the way for Phish, the Dave Matthews Band, Billy Strings, and many others. For all of these achievements (and many others), they earned a Kennedy Center Honor in 2024, the highest cultural honor in the United States.
But when I think of the Grateful Dead, I think about the songbook. As gorgeous as Jerry Garcia’s guitar playing is or as creative as Phil Lesh’s bass lines are, the songs are what make the Grateful Dead such an enduring act. Just as jazz has standards, the folk and jam scenes have standards—and many of them are by the Grateful Dead. When I’m sitting around with my friends, and we’ve all got guitars, it’s always safe to play a Dead tune.
Workingman’s Dead is where the enduring nature of the songbook begins. Yes, the band had classic tunes like “Dark Star” and “The Other One” before this record, but one does not sit around a kitchen table with a banjo and play “Dark Star.” The Grateful Dead made a pivot in 1970 away from being merely impressive in their music and community-minded in their approach to their audience, but in bringing that community-mindedness to the music itself. As the record’s title implies, it’s Grateful Dead music that everyone can play and sing.
Opener “Uncle John’s Band” is a case in point. The lyrics, sung with gentle harmonies over acoustic guitars, paint the picture of a group of people gathering to make music together. The band literally invites the audience in: “Oh I want to know /Will you come with me?” It is sunny, bucolic, joyful music.
And yet, “Uncle John’s Band” contains this bedeviling bridge section. Launching with a thick minor chord, the bridge dispels the warm, fuzzy feeling of the rest of the song. It’s a launchpad for the band to use in concert, from which they can spin one of their gnarled improvisational webs. By combining the inviting tune of “Uncle John’s Band” with this bridge section, they give the audience something to sing together, but then grab them by the hand and take them somewhere they had never been before.
Listen to the Album:
Perhaps the best-known iteration of this new approach is “Casey Jones,” one of the rare Dead tunes that one might encounter on the radio. It embraces lyricist Rober Hunter’s penchant for folkisms (“trouble with you is the trouble with me / you got two good eyes but you still don’t see”) and a singalong chorus. It’s the Grateful Dead simply having fun, spinning a yarn just for the sake of it, their instruments still winding around each other in strange and elaborate patterns. There’s no cosmic bewilderment or experimental improv—it’s just good music. I have no problem with cosmic bewilderment, but for every “Cryptical Envelopment,” there needs to be a “Casey Jones” to build the community in the first place.
The band continues the folk tradition by adding their own stories: “New Speedway Boogie” is a sinister, loping tune about the Altamont Speedway disaster. Garcia’s voice twists into an uncharacteristic snarl that condemns the violence, with the line “one way or another / this darkness has got to give.” That line, repeating over the course of the song, is a hymn for that community—that there is a way out of the dark cloud left by the event. Like the best folk tunes, it can be re-appropriated for new calamities and new occasions for collective healing, even today.
Workingman’s Dead established its own legacy quite quickly; the band followed it with American Beauty, a record in a similar idiom that gave us more classics, like “Ripple,” “Brokedown Palace,” and “Box of Rain.” It forever changed the band’s trajectory, bringing the warmth and community of their culture into the music itself.
This is more important than ever. The band is aging; we lost Phil Lesh last year. Dead & Company have dramatically scaled back their efforts. But the Dead’s music lives on, largely because of the feeling that songs like “Uncle John’s Band” create when anyone sings them.
Listen: