Rosemary - 2013 Remaster

"Rosemary" is the third track on Aoxomoxoa. It's also included on Skeletons from the Closet: The Best of the Grateful Dead, where it is once again the third track. The song is one of the Dead's most mysterious. Just under two minutes long, it's a delicately beautiful tune with no percussion, driven by gentle guitar and ambiguous, poetic lyrics. Jerry Garcia's vocals are restrained and sung through a filter so that they sound distant and sort of otherworldly, which is fitting for a song that paints a mysterious scene of a woman sitting by a window with a garden growing around her before going away, leaving the garden to die and be sealed up. The song ends with the strange statement, "No one may come here, since no one may stay."

The song is so short that David Dodd at Dead.net suggests it may have been an intentional fragment. "I think this is one of those songs constructed intentionally by Garcia (and Hunter?) to be a fragment," Dodd says. "They've talk in interviews about loving the old, collected songs that were fragments." In the song, Rosemary sits before a mirror, which is interesting because Aoxomoxoa is a mirror-word that is spelled exactly the same forwards or backwards. Also, the whole album, as Dodd observes, "speaks to reflections."

Some have suggested that the song bears similarities to a novel titled The Secret Garden, published in 1911 by Frances Hodgson Burnett. The Secret Garden is about a 10-year-old girl named Mary (just a "rose" away from Rosemary) who finds a secret garden that has been locked ever since Mrs. Craven, the woman who once cared for the garden, died. Following his wife's death, Craven's husband locked the garden and buried the key. The novel doesn't precisely mirror the song, but it's close enough to spark the imagination of many Deadheads.