Black Peter

The other night at Rosh Hashonah dinner, my stepbrother was playing my guitar and found his way into “Black Peter.” This was not because he had ever sat down and learned it, but because it’s embedded so deeply in his unconscious that he could teach it to himself in real time. This is yet another Dead tune that I loved as a kid without knowing why, and then didn’t think about for several decades. But now that it’s back in the front of my mind, I figured I would work it through.

Like all the best Jerry tunes, this is neither complicated nor difficult to play, but it is unpredictable and intriguing.

I didn’t originally come to the song from the studio recording. I first heard it on What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been, which includes the Bear’s Choice version, recorded live on 2/13/70. It’s just Jerry and Bobby on acoustic guitars, and it has more of an introspective vulnerability than the studio version. Jerry sings it extraordinarily well. He could really have been an excellent vocalist if he had taken more care of himself.

The Deadheads also recommend the version from 10/29/77, segueing neatly out of “Not Fade Away”. Jerry plays a slide solo, which isn’t his strong suit, but then he loses the slide for his outtro solo, and it is a real beauty.

The Day of the Dead compilation has a radical rearrangement of “Black Peter” by Anohni and yMusic. It’s lovely, but it only obliquely relates to the original song.

So where did Robert Hunter get the name Black Peter? There are a lot of possibilities: St Nicholas’ extremely problematic assistant; two different 18th century German criminals; a British card game with racist illustrations; a Miloš Forman film from 1964; a Sherlock Holmes story; a fish in a novel about King Arthur. We will never know which one Hunter was thinking of. In his book of annotated lyrics, Hunter says that he intended “Black Peter” to be an uptempo shuffle, and that it was Jerry’s idea to do it slow and sad. Hunter never revealed who (if anyone) Annie Bonneau is, or where Saint Angel is.

From Buzz Poole’s 33 1/3 book about Workingman’s Dead, I learned that Hunter started writing songs about death after drinking from a glass of apple juice dosed with $50,000 worth of crystal LSD. His trip included a vision of blood pouring out of Janis Joplin’s mouth, the assassinations of JFK and Lincoln, and his own death repeated over and over. This is exactly the kind of thing that has kept me from wanting to try acid myself, but Poole takes a romantic view of the drug’s role in the Dead’s creativity.

For the Dead, LSD revealed glimpses of the unknowable, hints of the unimagined and unthought, bestowing to these wily witnesses comfort in the assurance of mystery, accepting that the divine might never be more than a confluence of bodily sensations, a mind speaking to itself (pp. 109-110).

Poole interviews Ron Wickersham, co-founder of Alembic and the recording engineer for Workingman’s Dead. Wickersham describes the sessions as unusually sober and serious.

I don’t know if it was forced by financial factors or what, but I know they had something to say and they got it done and that was that. This was important music. Everyone knew it was important music, like classical music, or serious folk music. Something was being expressed that only music could express (p. 19).

Poole has a lot more to say about the song’s lyrics and how they relate to the larger themes of the album, the nature of existence, and the Dead’s own history. See the book for all that. I’m more interested in the music. So let’s dig into the studio version of “Black Peter” and see what’s going on.

The first half of the verse alternates A7 and D7, the key of A blues. That sliding A7 chord is a cornerstone of my relationship to the blues. You finger it a fret down and then slide up, so E-flat and C resolve up to E and C-sharp. Then Jerry repeats the same thing a fourth up on D7. He could have stuck with this two-chord loop for the whole tune and it would have made for a perfectly satisfying blues groove. But the second half of the verse wanders off in new directions.

The Em chord on “Annie Bonneau from Saint Angel” could be the minor v chord in A blues, but it turns out to represent a complete shift to E Dorian mode instead.

| Em | Bm | A  G | F#m |
| Em | %  | D7   | %   | A7 | % |

The bridge is another unexpected harmonic twist, a shift to the key of C major. But the second chord is Em, and that is a strange choice. It’s part of the key, but it’s not a commonly used chord. I assume Jerry is calling back to the Em in the second half of the verse. The subsequent Dm and Am chords undermine the sense of C as the tonic, putting us in more of a modal A natural minor feel instead. The Dm to G to C reestablishes the bright key of C on the line “sun going up and then”, but then with “the sun it’s going down”, we return to A minor. The line “shine through my window” is on a wistful, fractured Fmaj7, an Am chord with F underneath it. Is it part of C major? A minor? Who knows?

| C     | %  | Em    | %  |
| Dm    | Am | Em    | %  |
| Dm    | G  | C  Em | Am |
| Fmaj7 | %  | C     | D7 | % |
| Dm7   | %  | Fmaj7 | %  | 
| A7    | %  |

On “my friends they come around”, Jerry lifts unexpectedly up to D7, and the hypermeter gets disrupted. The D7 doesn’t feel like the IV chord from A blues here, it feels like the big bright II chord in C, part of the “Lydian cadence.” This then shifts to parallel Dm7 on the second “come around”, back into darkness, and then on the third “come around” to the ambiguously melancholy Fmaj7 before finally, finally returning to the A blues riff. Pigpen’s harmonica over this riff is so sweet. I wish they had used his harp in more of their songs. I also love Pigpen’s organ playing on the tune; it’s minimalist by necessity, but it suits the vibe. The Dead’s more technically adept keyboard players tended to overdo it on this kind of tune.

By the way, Jerry’s vocal doubling on the bridge is sloppy, but that sloppiness adds to the vibe. A more confident and polished vocal performance might not have had the same vulnerability to it. For the most part, I wish the Dead would just have sung better, but sometimes their limitations enhance rather than detract from the music.

At the end of the last verse, Jerry follows Em with the sliding D7 chord, and then never returns to A7. Instead, he just rides out on D7, so your sense of the tonic shifts from A blues to D blues. Why did Jerry do this? I don’t know, but it works. The song ends on a version of the descending sixths blues cliche; this is probably the place where I first heard it.

Speaking of Pigpen: he only sings one song on Workingman’s Dead, the banging “Easy Wind”, but his spirit animates “Black Peter.” Buzz Poole says that “Pigpen’s influence bonded the Dead, using the blues to pull together the old time music, traditionals, and bluegrass picking” (p. 121). Blues is the unifying throughline of Jerry’s guitar style as well, and the basis of his best songwriting.

Buzz Poole connects “Black Peter” to “And We Bid You Goodnight”, released on Live/Dead seven months before Workingman’s Dead came out. After a bunch of epic acid freakouts and open-ended grooves, they end the album on a 35-second a cappella gospel tune. Poole calls it “the germ from which all Grateful Dead music grew” (p. 14). Here’s a later performance of it.

 

This tune was written in the late 19th century. Alan Lomax recorded it in the Bahamas in 1935, where it had become a common funeral song. Live/Dead also includes a cover of “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” by the Reverend Gary Davis. Are you detecting a theme here? A fascination with death is there in the name of the band, in the skull imagery, in “Black Peter” and “Brokedown Palace” and “Morning Dew” and “Jack Straw” and all the traditional murder ballads. The Dead’s fascination with death (especially Jerry’s fascination with it) is the thing that gives the music its edge. All those cheerful modal grooves could float away on a cloud of hedonistic solipsism if mortality wasn’t always lurking in the background.