Article titled “Ever grateful” by Jonathan Pitts in the Baltimore Sun July 22. Pitts interviewed Donna Jean Godchaux-Mackay at the American Roots Music Festival in Falling Waters WV. I was there, too, and Donna Jean and the Tricksters played a terrific set.
A couple of excerpts from the story:
Godchaux – now officially Donna Jean Godchaux-Mackay – is the only woman ever to have been a member of the Grateful Dead, and at 59, she’s old enough to be a grandmother. The flowing, nearly waist-length hair is flaxen now. As the Tricksters, her new band, swings into a slinky blues tune and she begins to sway, it’s hard to tell whether she has grown older or younger in the 28 years since she parted ways with the world’s first, biggest and most influential jam rock band.
She grew up Donna Jean Thatcher near Muscle Shoals, a northwestern Alabama town known for its influential recording scene. By 12, she had met a few musicians and “caught studio fever.” During her freshman year, she was splitting time between cheerleading at the local high school and doing backup vocals for the likes of Dionne Warwick, Percy Sledge and Boz Scaggs. She even recorded with Elvis Presley, on albums such as Let’s Be Friends and Back in Memphis, both 1970 releases.
“A total, absolute gentleman,” she says. “I had such a crush on him.”
…as Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, took the stage, “each band was better than the last,” she says. “When the Dead finally came on, they were on fire. They never did the same thing twice! To them, music was an adventure, like something spiritual.
“I’d never heard anything like that. I thought, ‘This is what I want to do.”
She met the Zen Tricksters, a Dead-style jam band based in Long Island, N.Y., during a benefit two years ago and, when they invited her to sing, was so impressed with their musicianship and originality that she started sharing the stage at gigs. (Baltimore native Mookie Siegel, formerly of Bob Weir’s band, Ratdog, plays keyboards.)
“They have the improvisational skills of the Dead, but a style all their own,” she says.
I haven’t seen the American Roots set online yet, but here is a recording of Donna Jean and the Tricksters from A Bear’s Picnic last weekend.