The Grateful Dead

The Grateful Dead#

I suspect that more people have heard of the the band, The Grateful Dead, than the story, but as with so many things, the story came first…

In David Gans’ “Playing in the band: an oral and visual portrait of the Grateful Dead”, published in 1985, p38, Jerry Garcia describes the origin of the name of the band in 1966:

Garcia: We were standing around in utter desperation at Phil [Lesh]’s house in Palo Alto [trying to think up a name for the band]. There was a huge dictionary, big monolithic thing, and I just opened it up. There in huge black letters was ‘The Grateful Dead.’ It … just cancelled my mind out. We decided to have it, but it was funny… One of the things about the name, right from the beginning, was that it had a lot of power. It was kind of creepy. People resisted it at first. They didn’t want us to be the Grateful Dead— it was too weird. But… I don’t think the connotation is nearly as creepy as it used to be, though sometimes the power is very evident.

One of the most common suggestions for what that dictionary might have been is Funk and Wagnall’s standard dictionary of folklore mythology and legand:

grateful dead The motif (E341 ff.; Types 505-508) of a very widespread group of folktales, which typically begin with the hero, as he starts on a journey, coming upon a group of people ill-treating or refusing to bury the corpse of a dead man who had died before paying his debts. The hero gives his last penny, either to pay the man’s debts or to give him decent burial, and goes on his way. Within a few hours a traveling companion joins him (occasionally in the form of a horse or other animal, but usually in human form), who aids him in some impossible task (or a series of tasks and adventures), gets him a fortune, saves his life, marries him to a princess, etc. Sometimes the companion helps the hero on the condition that they divide all winnings. Sometimes this proves to be half the princess, or a first-born child. But he relents and relinquishes his half when the other is about to fulfil the promise. The story ends with the companion’s disclosing himself as the man whose corpse the other had befriended. (See Gerould, Grateful Dead, Folklore Society, 1908). See TOBIT.

I also heard Ben Haggerty suggest, in his telling of one variant of the actual folktale, “The Grateful and the Dead”, at Stealing Thunder, 2025, that Jerry Garcia had been in the City Lights bookshop in San Francisco, home to the beats, browsing the shelves and coming across a copy of a book containing fifty or more versions of the tale. I think we can take that as just a story, although the book containing fifty or more versions of the tale certainly does exist: Gerould’s “The grateful dead; the history of a folk story”.

Gerould’s work provides a categorisation and synopsis of wide range of variants of the tale, in a wide variety of languages.

The followong variant, which is one I tend to prefer, is close to the version I head Ben Haggerty tell at Stealing Thunder 2025, in which the dead man was a blacksmith(?) who has taken all the iron from that place; the conceit with the witches saw the young man take a sack of what looked like gold (but turned to worthless leaves?) whilst the companion took what looked to be worthless (“oh, you don’t want that..”). The troll was a (the?) devil (?).

A variant of the grateful dead tale can also be foiund in the mediaeval romamce of Sir Amadace.

I have noted a narrative form elsewhwere, in my Middle English Romances stroynotes collection.