Level: 3
Tuning: Standard

his Garcia/Robert Hunter collaboration first appeared in concerts in 1969, then on 1970's "Workingman's Dead," an album that was more acoustic than their previous efforts, and that featured more vocal harmonies and tighter arrangements. The lyric to "Uncle John's Band" suggests a possible anthem about the Dead itself, but Robert Hunter acknowledged he was partly thinking of the New Lost City Ramblers, who introduced a generation of urban northerners to old-time music (John Cohen was nicknamed "Uncle John."). A few of NLCR's songs were referenced in "Uncle John's Band" such as "same story the crow told me." This key-of-C arrangement starts with an instrumental hook that was heard on the record, and the verse has a Travis-style, alternating thumb-bass, fingerpicking backup. But it changes, after 8 bars, to a strumming style with occasional arpeggios. The instrumental solo is a mixture of fingerpicking and strumming, with no steady thumb beat, and no particular pattern. Notice the odd bar of _ time in the verse.