Elizabeth Cotten

In early 1961, a 19 year old Bob Dylan, having dropped out of college at the end of his freshman year, travelled to New York City, ostensibly to visit his idol Woody Guthrie, hospitalised with Huntingdon's Disease. He headed straight for Greenwich Village, by then the epicentre of the folk music revival that Dylan was hoping to become a part of. In his recent autobiography Chronicles he writes; 'Greenwich was full of full of folk clubs and bars and those of us who played them all played the old timey folk songs, rural blues and dance tunes'.

Even among Deadheads, there's always been a sense that Jerry Garcia's studio albums have been somewhat ignored. Part of this ties back to the often repeated urban legend that the Grateful Dead were never as good in the studio as they were live – an argument that has some truth but tends to downplay the merits of the studio albums, which had their own distinct attributes. This also applies to Garcia's studio records, but as a whole they're more problematic than the Dead's catalog.

by Shelia R. Cotten (Author), Elizabeth A. Yost (Author), Ronald W. Berkowsky (Author), Vicki Winstead (Author), William A. Anderson (Author)