Hart Valley Drifters - Folk Time

Pitchfork 78

For those who think of Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia and lyricist Robert Hunter as major figures in American music, the Hart Valley Drifters’ Folk Time is a monumental discovery. Recorded in 1962, Folk Time is Garcia’s only known surviving studio recording from his banjo days before attaining electricity a few years later. The future Dead guitarist is clearly the quintet’s leader, or at least most charismatic, and the primary singing voice through most of the 17-song session, with the group’s vocal trio also including Robert Hunter on upright bass and future New Riders of the Purple Sage founder David Nelson on guitar. Folk Time captures three lifelong collaborators during their invaluable time exploring the roots of American music before making their own.

Though the front cover portrait of Garcia as an itinerant young Mumford with suspenders and bed-roll might read as a little doofy at first, it’s also accurate. Garcia and his friends took up bluegrass and old-time music in the early ’60s with the same bright-eyed bushy-tailed enthusiasm that young folkies have displayed in every decade since. The difference is what the soon ex-Drifters did with it. Garcia fed folk traditions into the Dead’s psychedelic maw and eventually became an influential figure in bluegrass in his own right, inspiring longhairs to take to the banjo after his participation in 1975’s best-selling Old & in the Way. Though Deadheads have traded hissy audience recordings of Garcia’s early projects for decades, the KZSU tape never even existed as a rumor. It was found by filmmaker (and liner note writer) Brian Miksis in 2008 and never circulated.

Taped in mono around a single microphone in the last months of 1962 at Stanford University’s KZSU, the Hart Valley Drifters were decidedly non-Stanford students and the opposite of radicals. The quintet hew strictly to the bounds of bluegrass and old-time music, even making sure to distinguish between the two styles during their band introductions, with Garcia playing guitar on the former, banjo on the latter. And it’s not that they’re especially breathtaking or groundbreaking traditionalists, either. They pick well together and know how to sing as a group. Even some notes don’t arrive in perfect harmony, the gospel back-and-forth of “Standing in the Need of Prayer” and dynamics of traditional foot-stompers like “Pig in a Pen” come off with jubilance, offering a hint of the charm that would (for some) carry the Dead through their most ragged moments.

The Drifters probably wouldn’t be of much interest if not for their personnel. Comparing the one track Folk Time shares with Garcia’s later bluegrass combo Old & In the Way, “Pig in a Pen,” reveals everything the Hart Valley Drifters lacked, but could taste. But, like Bob Dylan hoboing around Greenwich Village covering Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly songs, Folk Time is the sound of Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter absorbing their own set of influences, building their repertoires, and finding their voices.

Containing the only extant recordings of Garcia singing Dock Boggs’s “Sugar Baby” (likely learned from Harry Smith’s fabled Anthology of American Folk Music) and winking, 19th-century sexual-political ballads like “Billy Grimes, the Rover,” Folk Time will be a delight for acoustic-minded Dead freaks. Eventually becoming one of rock’s most distinct vocalists, often getting by on charisma and expressiveness more than note-for-note accuracy, Garcia’s singing on Folk Time is far more developed than other circulating audience-made folk era tapes (and the earliest Grateful Dead recordings) would suggest. The 20-year-old Garcia fakes the slightest Southern twang on the opening “Roving Gambler” and elsewhere, perhaps involuntarily, but mostly his affable California reediness is in place.

Unquestionably the best performance on the disc is the closer, a blues arrangement of “Sitting on the Top of the World” featuring only Ken Frankel’s guitar and Garcia’s voice, and a sure stunner for Deadheads. There’s a touch more of the affected twang, but the performance and recording transcend Garcia’s age and experience, drawing from a quiet power and providing the only real glimpse of the singer he would become in the Dead. Perhaps even using the single microphone as an instrument, Garcia’s voice brushes down to a whisper. Moving with a lazy gait, Garcia catches the song’s carelessness with all the conviction of a California native. Though Garcia’s singing had a long way to go, it’s especially evident how the conversational instrumental details of the Hart Valley Drifters could turn into the improvisational pockets of the Dead, the traded lines of “Nine Pound Hammer” only a few volts away from the twining guitars of “China Cat Sunflower.”

Picking up the banjo after being discharged from the Army in 1960, Garcia immersed himself in folk music for a half-decade, practicing obsessively, working as a music teacher, and playing in a series of bands around the Palo Alto area, including the Thunder Mountain Tub Thumpers, the Black Mountain Boys, and others. Like many other central ’60s musicians who would eventually plug in and freak out, Garcia came of musical age during the great folk scare, finding post-War solace in ancient (and ancient-seeming) songs. Only a few years from dashing headlong into the neon-pulsing present tense of LSD, Garcia and others first dove deep into a mythic past that seemed to come alive in the grooves of old records and zoetrope-like flicker between banjo rolls.

But they don’t always sound as if they believe it themselves. The album’s most unconvincing performance isn’t one of the mountain songs or labor tunes, but the traditional “All the Good Times Have Past and Gone.” Nelson was 19, Garcia was 20, and Hunter was 21 and who even could take that sentiment seriously coming from them? It’s perhaps the same reason why Garcia seems to occupy “Sitting on Top of the World” so effortlessly, a song he would sing as an ebullient bounce on the Dead’s 1967 studio debut and keep in his songbook until just before his 30th birthday in 1972. But with the Hart Valley Drifters in the early ’60s, the good times were only just showing the first signs of starting.