Uncle John's Band - 2013 Remaster

Deadies Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter collaborated on "Uncle John's Band," which was originally part of their stage set before they recorded it as a single track from their Workingman's Dead album. It would go on to become one of their better-known songs, even making it into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's "500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll." The style is a laid-back bluegrass-folk arrangement on acoustic guitar. Vocals are in close harmony in a conscious effort to echo Cosby Stills & Nash - it worked, because CS&N covered it on their 2009 concert circuit.

Lots of Americana to touch on here - this was the first time the epithet "goddamn" had been heard in a Hot 100 hit. A "buckdancer" is "one who dances the buck-and-wing," according to The Dictionary of American Regional English. The phrase "buckdancer's choice" is both a popular fiddle tune of Appalachia, and the title of a poetry collection by the American poet James Dickey; you'll recognize him more when we tell you that one of his other works was turned into a little 1972 film called Deliverance.

More Americana: the line "fire and ice" references American poet Robert Frost's poem of the same name, and the line "Don't tread on me" is a famous phrase that first came out during the American Revolution from Britain - scope out an image of a yellow flag with a coiled, hissing snake sometime, that's the "Gadsden flag," later popular with the American Tea Party political movement. The line "the same story the crow told me" references Johnny Horton's "The Same Old Tale the Crow Told Me," which was the B-side to the better-known "Sink the Bismarck." While that's a British song, Horton was very much an American rockabilly artist (and he has no relation to the Horton who hears a who).