Jerry Garcia: Well, my mother had me take piano lessons for years and years and years, from the time I was really small, but I had a good ear, and so I was able to learn– when the piano teacher would play the thing I was supposed to learn during the week, I would memorize it, and then next time I come in, I could play it. So I never really learned anything. I didn’t learn how to read, I didn’t learn anything about music. All I did was develop an ear. My mother wanted for me to be musically schooled. My mom had an old Steinway upright, you know. I grew up with instruments around: my father’s saxophones and clarinets, and we had a trumpet. And I fooled around on all of them some; I could make a sound on them. But really, none of it took until, I guess, I must have been fourteen. And that was when rock and roll was just starting to happen, and I fell in love with the sound of electric guitar on records, like a lot of kids must have in the ‘50s. And I started looking at electric guitars in pawn shop windows with big eyes, you know, “I want one of those in the worst way.” On my fifteenth birthday, my mother gave me an accordion. You know, I went completely nuts. I said, “I don’t want an accordion, I want an electric guitar.”
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JG: But I convinced her, and she got me a pawn shop Danelectro, and that was my first guitar.
NS: Last time we talked to you were talking about the influence of Folkways and just generally the influence of traditional music that you heard coming up.
JG: Right.
NS: You said, like, I mean, obviously you’re listening to the pop, electric, rock music–
JG: Well, there’s more to it, I mean, when I was listening to rock and roll, there was no such thing as rock and roll. It was really rhythm and blues. And there were two Black stations in the Bay Area that I used to listen to. All of a sudden, I became aware, “Hey, there’s this whole other kind of music they play on these other radio stations.” This was during the Eddie Fisher era, you know, of popular music: Patti Page and you know that kind of stuff–real straight. And all of a sudden, here’s this other music, you know. That’s where I first heard Chuck Berry and Little Richard and Ray Charles.
NS: Then how did you get to the banjos, you know, getting into that whole scene?
JG: Well, that was during the folk scare, you know. I think I probably went to see Pete Seeger, but that wasn’t what got me into banjo playing. What happened was that somehow or another, a friend of mine maybe loaned me a record, an old Flatt & Scruggs record, the Mercury album called Country Music. I had never heard bluegrass music before, at least I don’t remember hearing it. But I remember when I heard this record, there was something very resonant about it, you know what I mean? It was like, “I’ve heard this music somewhere before.” Something about the way the harmonies worked, you know, something about the singing style, something about the kind of–it doesn’t really sound country in the city person’s, you know–
NS: Stereotype of what country is.
JG: Stereotype, exactly.
NS: It’s not locked in.
JG: No, this had a lot of bounce to it, and it sounded very smooth. But when I heard that banjo, you know, Earl Scruggs playing five-string banjo, I had to make that sound.
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NS: What about Folkways specifically? Were there any particular–
JG: Well, that was my first exposure to real folk music. I mean, before that, what I heard was all second-hand stuff, you know, sort of stuff like the Kingston Trio and that, you know, strictly top 40 folk music, the citybillies, and you know what I mean, city folk interpreters of what was really rural music. I didn’t really understand the distinction. It wasn’t until I was exposed to that Harry Smith collection of Folkways stuff, and I heard all these records, and I said, “My god, listen to that stuff, this stuff has incredible energy, and it has amazing strength.”
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JG: That’s where I learned clawhammer picking, or frailing or whatever you want to call it, drop thumb. From listening to the Clarence Ashley cuts on that one album. I mean, that record almost set me up.
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