Jerry Garcia and The Grateful Dead
Jerome John Garcia was born in 1942, in San Francisco's Mission District.
His father, a spanish immigrant named Jose "Joe" Garcia, had been a jazz
clarinetist and Dixieland bandleader in the thirties, and he named his new son
after his favorite Broadway composer, Jerome Kern. In the spring of 1948, while
on a fishing trip, Garcia saw his father swept to his death by a California
river.
After his father's death, Garcia spent a few years living with his
mother's parents, in one of San Francisco's working-class districts. His
grandmother had the habit of listening to Nashville's Grand Ole Opry radio
broadcasts on Saturday nights, and it was in those hours, Garcia would later say,
that he developed his fondness for country-music forms-particularly the deft ,
blues-inflected mandolin playing and mournful, high-lonesome vocal style of
Bill Monroe, the principal founder of bluegrass. When Garcia was ten, his
mother, Ruth, brought him to live with......
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