The most common entry point for Grateful Dead listeners is the acoustic folkie material, especially “Uncle John’s Band”. That makes sense; the song is fun, memorable, and relatively accessible. It seems like it would make a good campfire singalong. But then you get in there to try to learn it, and the song turns out to be extremely odd. Like a lot of Dead tunes!
This excellent episode of the 500 Songs podcast tells how label executive Joe Smith was ecstatic when he heard UJB for the first time. He supposedly ran into the hallway and grabbed people, shouting “We’ve got a single! We’ve got a single!” UJB was the first Dead song that made it onto the Hot One Hundred, getting up to number sixty-nine. It sounds very little like “Touch of Grey“, the only Dead song to hit the top ten, but they share a kind of wry “what are you gonna do” attitude.
The version of UJB on Workingman’s Dead is the canonical one, but there are a million live versions too. I am a bad Deadhead for not really liking any of them. It was fun to sing along with it in the moment at shows, but in the cold light of day, the out-of-tune vocals are an insurmountable obstacle for me. Also, the song loses something with full drum kits and keyboards; I’m too attached to the sound of acoustic guitars and hand percussion. That said, the live versions can be launchpads for creative improvisation. In this 80s version, Jerry plays some beautiful doubletime lines at 4:58.
Like “Playing in the Band“, UJB has what Ulf Olsson calls a “trap door”, a repeated phrase that the band has tactitly agreed is going to be the entry point into freeform jamming and segues into other songs.
These phrases stand in marked contrast to the feel of the rest of the songs in which they are found… In “Uncle John’s Band,” for instance, the phrase over which jamming takes place is in Dm, while the rest of the song is in G; it is 7/4, while the rest of the song is in 4/4; and it possesses a very tight and distinctive rhythmic structure, while the rest of the song tends more toward a loose, open rhythmic feel.
On 11/17/73, the band does some remarkable journeying through the trap doors in both PITB and UJB. First they segue from PITB into UJB, and then from there into “Morning Dew“. They then segue back into UJB, and then into into the PITB reprise. There’s another nice combination on 5/19/77, when they find their way from PITB into the UJB ending jam; they then have to get from there to the beginning of UJB. On 12/26/79, the UJB trap door leads out into nine other songs before the band finally comes out of “Shakedown Street” into the final UJB chorus. None of these performances of UJB do much for me in their treatment of the song itself, but as episodes within improvised sequences, they definitely fire my imagination.
Everybody with an acoustic guitar takes a crack at UJB eventually. The most famous cover versions are by the Indigo Girls and Jimmy Buffett; many people hear those before the Dead original. I prefer it when people push the tune’s boundaries a little more, like Lucius does for the Day of the Dead compilation.
John Scofield’s version is too adult-contemporary-sounding for my tastes, but the man can play some beautiful guitar.
Many years ago, I went to a modern dance show in Central Park. Trisha Brown performed “Accumulation”, and I was pleasantly surprised that the piece was accompanied by UJB. I don’t know anything about modern dance, but I loved this.
I myself have done some sampling and remixing of UJB.
The Dead worked UJB up as a complete instrumental, and then they sent Robert Hunter a tape so he could write lyrics to it. Hunter says that when he listened, the phrase “God damn, Uncle John’s mad” popped into his head, and then he went from there.
So who is Uncle John? There are endless fan theories, ranging from John the Baptist to Mississippi John Hurt, and all of them are wrong. An interviewer asked Hunter if UJB was about John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers. Hunter liked the idea, but only after it was suggested to him. Another theory is that Uncle John is Jerome John Garcia, and that his band is the Dead. The real answer is probably that Hunter wasn’t referring to any specific person; he just plucked the name out of the collective unconscious, reacting to the uncountably many Uncle Johns in history, literature and folklore.
Here’s an annotated listening guide to the studio version.
0:00 Intro
The tune begins with two bars of Jerry strumming a G chord on acoustic in a vaguely Latin-sounding rhythm. (People tend to call it “calypso”, but not from an informed place.) The rest of the band joins for two more bars of this groove. Then they shift to a loop of G, Bm, C and D while Jerry improvises a sunny G major melody on top. The C chord is anticipated by half a beat, in keeping with the Latin feel.
0:15 Verse one
The chords are just G and C, but what is the meter? In the line “Well the first days are the hardest days, don’t you worry anymore”, the words “worry anymore” are part of a seven-beat phrase. Is it a bar of 3/4 and a bar of 4/4, or a bar of 4/4 and a bar of 3/4, or one long bar of 7/4? The guitar implies 3+4, while the vocal implies 4+3. I don’t know if the band had even made up their mind about it. When I play and sing the song myself, I can’t help but smooth the phrase out to 4/4, as do most people who cover the song. But that asymmetry is deliberate and insistent; Jerry knew what he was doing.
0:28 Prechorus one
This could just be the second half of the verse, but I hear it as a new section. The first half (“Think this through with me”) is on Am, Em, C, and D. The second half (“Woah oh what I want to know) uses a faster and more complex harmonic rhythm. The chords are just G, C and D, but they fall in unexpected places in the bar. I hear the words “are you kind” as taking up a half hypermeasure, followed by one and a half hypermeasures of groove.
Jerry told people that he copied part of UJB from a Bulgarian or Macedonian folk song. I assumed that he was talking about the odd-meter bridge, but I learned from the Grateful Dead guide that it’s really the “Woah oh what I want to know” melody. Jerry very clearly stole it from a Macedonian tune called “Shto Mi e Milo”, which he heard on a record by The Pennywhistlers. Listen at 0:11.
Jerry always had impeccable taste in folk and traditional music, and I got a whole music history education just from chasing down tunes and artists that he talked about in interviews.
0:46 Verse two
What is a buckdancer’s choice? Jim Adams tells us:
A ‘buckdance’ is an energetic step dance performed in minstrel and vaudeville shows by an African-American male or a white male in blackface, considered to be a precursor to tap dancing. A ‘buckdancer’ refers to someone who dances the buck-and-wing, a fast and flashy clog dance usually performed in wooden-soled shoes. Buck-and-wing combines Irish clogging styles, high kicks, and complex African rhythms and steps such as the shuffle and slide. A buckdancer might be paid a buck for their dancing and the phrase ‘buckdancer’s choice’ is a popular fiddle tune from Appalachia.
Here’s Taj Mahal playing “Buckdancer’s Choice”.
The “fire from the ice” line is supposedly a reference to Robert Frost.
0:59 Prechorus two
I don’t have much to say here except that I like the wordplay in “Will you come with me, won’t you come with me?”
1:17 Chorus one
This is where the chorus should go in a normal song, anyway. The band yelling “God damn well I declare” was always a satisfying moment in shows. Even when Jerry had mentally checked out toward the end, that line always put a smile on his face. The chords here are just G, C, Am, D, but as usual, the harmonic rhythm is tricky and syncopated. The line “their motto is ‘Don’t Tread on Me'” is a reference to the Gadsden flag, which I now associate with gun-toting right-wingers. The Dead had a significant gun-toting libertarian streak. Remember that they were good friends with John Perry Barlow, which means that Jerry was just one degree of separation removed from Dick Cheney.
After the “god damn” part, we get the second half of the “normal” chorus, even thought we haven’t heard the first half of it yet. This is such weird song structure! Did Hunter originally have the normal chorus here and then Jerry moved some pieces around, or is this the way that Hunter originally wrote the lyrics? I have no idea, but the resulting structure feels like it’s inside-out.
1:45 Guitar solo
Jerry doesn’t sound as effortlessly self-assured on this solo as he does in later versions, and he gets a little swamped by the arrangement.
1:59 Verse three
The line “It’s the same story the crow told me” refers to an old country song made famous by Johnny Horton, though Hunter probably learned it from the New Lost City Ramblers.
2:13 Prechorus three
The line “Ain’t no time to hate” might refer to Emily Dickinson. Where does the time go, indeed.
2:29 Verse four
Jim Adams thinks that “beggar’s tomb” is a reference to the biblical story of Lazarus. What is it with Hunter and silver mines? He refers to one in “Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo” too.
2:42 Prechorus four
The Deadheads love it when Jerry muffs some lyrics and then sings the line, “how does the song go?”
2:59 Chorus two
Finally, the actual chorus! Why is Uncle John’s Band playing to the tide? It’s a lovely if nonsensical image.
3:27 Bridge
The meter changes to 7/4, though I hear it more specifically as a bar of 4/4 and two bars of 3/8. This is the first time the song leaves G major, moving into D Dorian mode, on a loop of Dm, G and C. The bridge ends on an arpeggiated Dm9 for a bar of 2/4, a bar of 4/4, and another bar of 2/4.
3:52 Prechorus five
It’s really the tail end of the prechorus, and the harmony is different: just the chords D, C and G. The percussion tapers off in a strange way; it seems like the band couldn’t quite agree on what was supposed to happen there, so they did a fadeout during mixing.
4:00 Chorus three
The first half is sung totally a capella, a rarity in a Dead song. It would be very stirring if these guys could sing. It’s still pretty stirring, actually. Live recordings of this part always sound terrible, but I promise that it was a holy moment at the shows.
4:28 Outtro
The song ends with a return to the 7/4 groove. That last note has always annoyed me; why is Phil singing “dee” while Jerry sings “da”? I guess if the song was too smooth and pleasant, it wouldn’t be so memorable.
I listened to UJB uncountably many times as a teenager, without having any idea at all what it might have meant. I knew the words sounded old-timey and probably referred to something folkloric, but it was completely opaque. Now I can go online and find out what a buckdancer’s choice is and listen to studio outtakes, but the song remains mysterious in many ways. As a teenager, I evidently liked feeling like I was on the outside of something, pressing my nose against the window of it. My current more closeup view of the Dead can be an unflattering one; they benefit from some mystery. But the ugliness is inextricable from the beauty. I have several friends who prefer the Dead to Crosby, Stills and Nash exactly because the Dead sing so much worse. There’s a sense that these are real guys, that they are telling you the truth, or at least a truth.