Happy Birthday Workingman's Dead

The Grateful Dead's Workingman's Dead, one of my favorite albums, was released 55 years ago today. This is its origin story.

Jun 14, 2025

My book Brothers and Sisters: the Allman Brothers Band and The Album That Defined The 70s is about a lot more than the album of the same name and includes the most extensive reporting ever about the relationship between the Grateful Dead and the ABB. This story about Workingman’s Dead is adapted from the book.

The following is an excerpt from Brothers and Sisters: the Allman Brothers Band and The Album That Defined The 70s, Copyright 2023, Alan Paul. Click the title to order from Amazon or here to order a signed copy directly from me.

By the time the Allman Brothers Band formed in 1969, the Dead was coming out of its heavy psychedelic phase and headed towards the proto-Americana of Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty. The two albums, released within five months of one another in 1970, are epochal, song-oriented, country-tinged collections that would forever stand as the undisputed highlights of the band’s studio career. The albums’ tunes reveal the heavy influence of The Band’s first two releases, which made a huge impact on both Jerry Garcia and lyricist Robert Hunter, the Dead’s primary songwriters.

The quieter songs were also a reaction to the band’s tumultuous 1969. The year saw the release of two primo psychedelic recordings: the labored studio effort, Aoxomaoxa, and the free-flowing Live Dead. In August, the Dead played a disastrous set at Woodstock, which was bad enough that they refused to appear on the album and movie. In December, the band played a central role in planning a free concert at California’s Altamont Raceway that was to feature them, Santana, Crosby, Stills Nash and Young, the Jefferson Airplane and the Rolling Stones. Some 300,000 fans arrived to find insufficient facilities and chaos. During the Stone’s headlining set, Meredith Curly Hunter was stabbed to death by a member of the Hell’s Angels. The motorcycle gang was in charge of security at the suggestion of the Dead, who never actually performed. The fiasco scarred the band.

In the wake of such a turbulent year, the Dead looked to scale back, turn inward and make more intimate music. It was also a reflection of where they found themselves as a new decade dawned. “All music played at any given time is a reflection of what is going on in that person’s life, and we are the kind of musicians who play how we feel,” says Kreutzmann.

With the band ready for a change of direction, owing Warner Bros almost $200,000 after Aoxomoxoa and not wanting to get deeper into debt, Garcia suggested the Dead approach their next album “like a country record… a few instruments, relatively simple and easy to perform songs.” It was, he said, a conscious effort to work fast and cheap and also to “expose a side of us that we hadn’t exposed very much.”

Garcia’s suggestion was consistent with The Dead’s direction, which had been trending rootsier at the time. Garcia had picked up pedal steel guitar and formed the New Riders of the Purple Sage, whose acoustic-based music reflected Garcia’s overall outlook and impacted his songwriting with Hunter. In the summer and fall of 1969, the Dead introduced their takes on country songs like Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried” (a #1 hit in 1968) and debuted material featuring Hunter’s imagery rooted in a mythic Americaincluding songs like "Dire Wolf" "Casey Jones," "Cumberland Blues," 'Uncle John's Band" and "Black Peter." By the winter, while the band was recording Aoxomoxoa, Garcia played acoustic guitar on stage on a couple of new songs, "Mountains of the Moon" and "Dupree's Diamond Blues."

The band had also become friendly with David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash. Garcia played the beautiful pedal steel guitar on Crosby Stills Nash and Young’s 1970 hit “Teach Your Children” and Crosby, Stills, and Nash were all frequent guests at Mickey Hart’s Marin County ranch.

CSN’s stacked vocal harmonies, Kreutzmann says, “changed the ballgame entirely.”

“We didn’t sit down and give them formal lessons or anything,” says Crosby. “We all just liked each other quite a bit and were hanging out a lot and they paid attention to what we were doing. They were brilliant musicians who saw something they could adopt.”

The Grateful Dead entered San Francisco’s Pacific High Studios in February 1970. True to Garcia’s expressed vision, they finished in just 10 days. Workingman’s Dead was a significant change; the music was far more approachable than their prior work. From the opening acoustic guitar and three-part vocal harmonies of “Uncle John’s Band” to the final notes of “Casey Jones,” the album is a mature collection of hummable songs that pulled listeners into an intimate communion.

The songs harkened back to the Dead’s roots in traditional music, as Hunter evoked a past that never existed, painting modernist lyrical pictures of a mythical American West and an enchanted English countryside. “Cumberland Blues” sounds like a labor anthem. “Dire Wolf” is a modernist twist on a fairy tale fable. ”Easy Wind” sounds like a long-lost blues classic. “Casey Jones” uses folk music motifs to tell a story about the band and their relationship with Neal Cassady.

Hunter named the album, as he usually did for the band. A pleased Garcia was listening to the finished recording and said, “It’s beginning to sound like a bit of a working man’s Dead.” Hunter replied, “Bingo, there’s your title.”

Positive reception was immediate upon the release of Workingman’s Dead on June 14. Rolling Stone’s Andy Zwerling proclaimed that “the Dead have finally produced a complete studio album,” noting that “the years of playing together have shown handsome dividends” and “The country feeling of this album just adds to the warmth of it.”

Their back-to-their-roots approach was in sync with the ongoing evolution taking place in the wider world of popular music. Country and acoustic blues-inflected rock emanated from Woodstock, New York, where the Band basically invented Americana in 1968, decades before the term came into vogue, to Los Angeles, where Poco, the Byrds (in separate lineups featuring Gram Parsons and Clarence White), and the Flying Burrito Brothers, which the Byrds’ Chris Hillman founded with Parsons. The Burritos’ were actually the first to record the Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses,” Parsons having learned it from a brief, but significant collaboration with Keith Richards. In 1969, Bob Dylan recorded Nashville Skyline, featuring Johnny Cash and A-list Nashville studio musicians. Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett and their gospel-infused good-time blues attracted Beatle George Harrison and guitar god Eric Clapton as band part-time members.