Jerome John Garcia was born in 1942, in San Francisco's
Mission District. His father, a spanish immigrant named Jose
'Joe'
Garcia, had been a jazz clarinetist and Dixieland bandleader in the
thirties, and he named his new son after his favorite Broadway
composer, Jerome Kern. In the spring of 1948, while on a fishing
trip, Garcia saw his father swept to his death by a California river.
After his father's death, Garcia spent a few years living with
his mother's parents, in one of San Francisco's working-class
districts. His grandmother had the habit of listening to Nashville's
Grand Ole Opry radio broadcasts on Saturday nights, and it was in
those hours, Garcia would later say, that he developed his
fondness
for country-music forms-particularly the deft , blues-inflected
mandolin playing and mournful, high-lonesome vocal style of Bill
Monroe, the principal founder of bluegrass. When Garcia was ten,
his mother, Ruth, brought him to live with her at a sailor's hotel and
bar that she ran near the city's waterfront.
lighting bold in red and blue square.
English: Haight Street, San Francisco, California,...
USGS Satellite photo of the San Francisco Bay Area...He spent much of his
time
there listening to the drunks', fanciful stories; or sitting alone
reading
Disney and horror comics and pouring through science-fiction
novels.
When Garcia was fifteen, his older brother Tiff - who years
earlier had accidentally chopped off Jerry's right-hand middle
finger
while the two were chopping wood - introduced him to early rock
&
roll and rhythm & blues music. Garcia was quickly drawn to the
music's funky rhythms and wild textures, but what attracted him
the
most were the sounds that came from the guitar; especially the
bluesy 'melifluousness' of players such as; T-bone Walker and
Chuck Berry. It was something he said that he had never heard
before. Garcia wanted to learn how to make those same sounds
he went straight to his mother and...