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Before forming the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia spent the early 1960s playing bluegrass music. In a local twist, his introduction to the genre came partly from St. John’s-based folklorist, bluegrass aficionado and Grammy Award-winner Neil Rosenberg.

Rosenberg wrote the liner notes for the recently released “Before the Dead” album — a collection of Garcia’s performances — mostly bluegrass — that marked the beginning of his “long, strange trip” to stardom.

“I don’t remember him ever playing the guitar during that time. He was already a very good banjo player, so that was why it was fun to jam with him.” Neil Rosenberg

Catching the bluegrass bug

Rosenberg moved to Newfoundland in 1968 when he became a folklore professor at Memorial University, but he spent his youth in Berkeley, Calif., where he was in a band called The Redwood Canyon Ramblers.

They were the San Francisco Bay Area’s first bluegrass band when they formed in 1959. They were also the first bluegrass band Garcia ever saw in concert.

He would go on to spend the first few years of the 1960s practising and performing bluegrass tunes.

Fast-forward to May 1964.

Rosenberg was in the last year of his folklore master’s degree program at Indiana University when Garcia paid him a visit. It was Garcia’s first trip outside of California; he was on a mission to learn more about bluegrass.

“At that point in time of course, we didn’t have YouTube and so on — it was hard to even find recordings. If you wanted to hear a lot of bluegrass, you had to go to parts of the country where it was being performed,” said Rosenberg, who wrote about that period in his memoir, “Bluegrass Generation” released in May.

Garcia crashed on couch

Garcia travelled with bluegrass musician and a friend of Rosenberg’s, Sandy Rothman. They were both into bluegrass and were in a band together called the Black Mountain Boys.

They decided to take a trip together across America in Garcia’s white 1961 Corvair to learn about, listen to and tape live bluegrass music.

“I didn’t really think about stuff like that at the time as historically significant, it was just something that happened,” recalled Rosenberg of the fact that Garcia crashed on a couch in his small apartment for two weeks.

Jerry Garcia. -Photo by Kevok Djansezian/Associated Press

“They weren’t the only people who came through town and dropped in on me because they were interested in this music. There was sort of a network of enthusiasts who had heard about me in California — every once in a while somebody’d call — ‘I’m in town’, you know, and ‘I’m a friend of so-and-so,’ that kind of thing. That was just part of what was going on at the time.

“It was good fun.”

Rosenberg was married, had a young daughter and was writing his thesis at the time, so he hung out with Garcia and Rothman “when I had spare time.”

“I introduced them to some people and sent them to see people and so on, and we went to see some shows, but basically we just hung out,” he recalled. He said they spent a lot of time jamming.

They played old fiddle tunes such as “Soldier’s Joy” and banjo pieces by Earl Scruggs.

They saw Bill Monroe perform a couple of times at the Brown County Jamboree. They also drove to Dayton, Ohio, to a bar called Ruby’s White Sands to see The Osborne Brothers. Garcia would sit near the side of the stage to record — he’d make tapes so he could listen to the music again later.

Rosenberg also introduced Garcia to “Mr. Tapes,” Marvin Hedrick, who had a large collection of bluegrass music. Garcia spent a day copying his tapes.

“That’s one thing that sort of links what we were doing back then in the world of bluegrass with what the Deadheads did later, was this taping of shows and trading (tapes) back and forth.”

Rosenberg said Garcia was focused on bluegrass and was “working really hard as a banjo player.”

“I don’t remember him ever playing the guitar during that time. He was already a very good banjo player, so that was why it was fun to jam with him.”

Rosenberg described Garcia as “a very nice person, just easygoing and friendly, (and) an extremely good musician.”

A significant ‘footnote’

When asked if he had any inkling Garcia would go on to become as famous as he did, Rosenberg said he “wasn’t thinking in those terms,” but he “was very impressed with his ability as a musician.”

“Also, the fact that he was such a personable guy who was easy to get along with, friendly, fun — all of that — so, he was in that sense memorable.”

Neil Rosenberg is a St. John’s-based bluegrass musician with the group Crooked Stovepipe, author of the definitive book, “Bluegrass: A History”, and member of the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame. -Juanita Mercer/The Telegram

Garcia was simply a “part of the scene for a while,” recalled Rosenberg, and then after a couple of weeks Garcia and Rothman moved on to the next stop in their bluegrass education.

Rosenberg described that time as a “kind of turning point” for music.

“That period of the early ’60s is when the folk music people got interested in bluegrass — that’s when that happened. Garcia’s involvement is pretty typical of that, so it was a big deal in the world of folk music. Then rock ’n’ roll came along and was much stronger, and bluegrass went another direction in a way.”

About a year and a half after Garcia’s visit with Rosenberg, The Grateful Dead was formed. Rosenberg said he never saw Garcia in person again after that, but followed his musical development “from a distance.”

Still, Garcia’s bluegrass education from people like Rosenberg during that trip in 1964 continued to influence his career. He returned to playing bluegrass several times over the years with groups such as Old & In The Way in the early 1970s, and the Jerry Garcia Acoustic Band in the late 1980s.

Rosenberg described his time with Garcia as a mere “footnote” in the Jerry Garcia story. Despite the brevity of their interactions, it’s clear Rosenberg played a small but significant role in Garcia’s catching the bluegrass bug.

juanita.mercer@thetelegram.com

Twitter: @juanitamercer_

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