Tennessee Jed

The Grateful Dead always had a folkie/Americana aspect, but in the early 1970s they leaned hard into country music, and it suited them. I found this song to be pretty cringe as a teenaged Deadhead in New York City, but it grew on me.

The tune is named for a 1940s radio Western, which sounds like it could have been the basis for Woody’s Roundup in Toy Story 2. For all I know, Robert Hunter had never been within a thousand miles of Tennessee when he wrote the lyrics, but they work okay if you don’t think about them too hard.

If you want to learn to play the tune, this is a good tutorial video, but why this cover image? Come on now. We’ll get back to that in a minute.

“Tennessee Jed” is in C, and the chord progression is pretty simple: C, F and G, a descending diminished blues cliche, and then a mixed C Mixolydian/C major turnaround at the end of each verse: Bb, F, G, C. The main riff is the most interesting part of the tune. It’s almost in C major pentatonic, but it also uses two different blue notes between D and E.

• The first note is a D on the seventh fret of the G string that Jerry bends most of the way up to E. Not all of the way!
• The second-to-last note is a D on the fifth fret of the A string that Jerry bends most of the way up to E-flat. Not all of the way!

You can demonstrate the importance of those blue notes to yourself by playing the riff on the regular fretted pitches. It sounds okay, but it definitely is not the actual music. (The riff sounds even worse on piano.) Jerry doesn’t hit the same precise pitches every time he bends notes, but it’s interesting that he does generally aim for the same pitch zones. You can tell that he’s playing the first E conspicuously flat because sometimes Bob Weir is playing E with normal intonation at the same time, and they are not in tune with each other.

So why is it so important to play those two notes out of tune? And why don’t you play any of the other notes out of tune? If you believe my galaxy-brain theory of blue notes, then Jerry is not just bending strings by an arbitrary amount; he is unconsciously aiming for specific microtonal pitches. The first note in the riff is probably supposed to be a just intonation major third, a little flat from the equal-tempered major third. The second-to-last note in the riff is probably supposed to be a subminor third, a little flat from the equal-tempered minor third.

Why analyze a country riff in terms of the blues? Because country and blues were originally the same music. The separate genre descriptors were motivated by racial considerations, not musical ones.

In a recent post, I talked about the folkloric integrity of the blues and the racial politics of white rock musicians playing the music without knowing its context. Folkloric integrity is an issue for country music too. Race is not so much an issue in a tune like “Tennessee Jed”, but class is; there is something unpleasant about the Dead and their fans appropriating Appalachian sounds for their own drug-addled amusement. As a Jewish kid from New York City, my relationship to country was probably similar to the one the members of the Dead had growing up in the San Francisco bay area: first distaste, then a condescending kind of ironic appreciation, then genuine appreciation. I don’t doubt that the Dead did eventually meet some rural people and learned to love their music from a better-informed place, but there’s still a cartoon-y aspect to the Deadheads’ idea of what country is. It’s a growth area.

BTW, enjoy Levon Helm’s cover, it’s a good one.