By her own admission, Donna Jean Godchaux was not a fan of the Grateful Dead when she arrived in California – then Donna Jean Thatcher – in 1970. Already a music industry veteran at 23, she had spent five years as a member of Southern Comfort, a group of singers regularly employed as backing vocalists at the renowned Fame studios in her native Alabama. But she was rigidly unimpressed with her San Francisco friends’ undying devotion to Jerry Garcia and co. She hated the band’s name and loudly opined that the only reason people liked them was because they were invariably out of their minds on drugs when they went to see them live. In fact, she could prove she was right: she offered to attend a Dead show sober, certain she would hate it.
It proved a fateful decision. By the end of the Dead’s set at the Winterland Ballroom, Thatcher – ostensibly retired from music – had announced: “If I sing again, it will be with this band”. Through attending other Dead shows she met a local pianist named Keith Godchaux, whom she subsequently married, and after meeting Garcia and angling for him to give her new husband a job, she found herself hired as well.
