new photographs discovered in the berkeley folk music festival collection.
As the Berkeley Folk Music Festival’s digital repository begins to go online in beta form, all kinds of amazing items are surfacing from the over 50,000 artifacts. This one is for all the deadheads out there. Both the metadata librarians and documentarian Brian Miksis (who helped bring the Jerry Garcia: Before the Dead CD to fruition) noticed a young Jerry Garcia in attendance at the 1962 Winter Berkeley Folk Music Festival.
These photographs have never been seen publicly, so far as we know. It makes sense that he would have been there as this was the era when he was deeply interested in the folk revival, learning and performing traditional songs and beginning to get obsessed with Scruggs-style bluegrass banjo picking.
The first one features Jerry listening intently to a lecture at the University of California by Sam Hinton, whose subtle ideas about how to interpret traditional folk music authentically perhaps influenced the aspiring young Garcia.
In the second unearthed photograph, Jerry sits happily in a University of California Berkeley lounge next to two folk revival luminaries, Ralph Rinzler and Jean Ritchie.
My favorite image has Jerry smiling and maybe even singing along with Bessie Jones and the Georgia Sea Island Singers (John Herald of the Greenbriar Boys is in the background too).
Is this where he encountered songs such as “Turkle Dove,” later known in his own repertoire as “Turtle Dove”? To be sure, it was on a few recordings by Bessie Jones, but perhaps Garcia heard it at Berkeley in 1962 in person. We cannot know for sure. Later, according to Sandy Rothman, Garcia’s friend and bandmate in the Jerry Garcia Acoustic Band, Garcia heard it on a tape Rothman gave him of Jody Stecher’s interpretation of the song.
Below, you can hear Bessie Jones’ version, recorded by Alan Lomax in 1960, one year after the folklorist himself presented a lecture at the Berkeley Folk Music Festival as a guest scholar at the event (recorded for posterity in the Berkeley Folk Music Festival Collection). For more background, here’s Bessie Jones telling Lomax more about the song. That is followed by Stecher’s interpretation and two of Garcia’s versions, one performed with the Jerry Garcia Acoustic Band in 1987 and another performed in 1987 with Bob Weir and Joan Baez.
