I am thinking about Native American musical influences on Garcia.
As far as I can tell, they are mediated by whites: Hank Williams’s “Kaw-Liga,” Bill Monroe’s “Cheyenne,”Peter Rowan’s “Land Of The Navajo” (which the latter inspired).
Is there any black traditional music with Native American narrative or musical themes? Like, any old banjo tunes about the Seminoles?
Some notes on classifying Garciaverse Musics
In narrating Jerry Garcia’s Musical Life Outside The Grateful Dead, I think in terms of the various musics he played.
One cut is geographic: 1) world vs. 2) American.
In terms of musics he directly quasi-publicly performed, The World is mostly only reggae and Indian music (e.g., Diga). He got some stuff from Canada, but it was either Americana (e.g., The Band) or pan-white pop (e.g., Bruce Cockburn’s “Waiting For A Miracle”) – not what I’d call “Canadian music”.
Everything else from The World comes to Garcia pre-mediated through America.
Within the second bucket, I want to distinguish a) indigenous music (Hawaiian, Native American) from b) music made by non-indigenous peoples.
As noted above, Native American music came to Garcia pre-mediated by whites. When he played “Native American”, he was playing white renderings of that music. I am guessing he jammed around at Hart’s with Rolling Thunder and others — I wonder if there are calendars, diaries, tapes?? –, but it falls sort of short of my fuzzy event threshold (“musics he directly quasi-publicly performed”).
It seems like the same is likely true of the other indigenous American music that Garcia engaged, Hawaiian. Let me put it another way: he directly heard Hawaiian music (grandmother Tillie loved it – McNally 2015, 36), but in playing pedal steel guitar he was playing what white people were doing, inspired by the islanders’ music. So it doesn’t get the full-on music font.
b) is the set of musics that get the special font and the central real estate in my table on Garciaverse musics.
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