Cumberland Blues

Another superficially traditional, profoundly weird Grateful Dead country song

Phil Lesh's passing hit me harder than I expected, probably because I've been so immersed in the Dead lately anyway. I persuaded MusicRadar to let me write a column about my favorite Phil basslines, one of which is "Cumberland Blues." Phil co-wrote the tune, and I assume he was responsible for its moments of intense musical oddness. Here's the studio version from Workingman's Dead. It includes Jerry's only banjo performance on a Grateful Dead song, aside from the last few seconds of the "Dark Star" single.

There is a real Cumberland mine in Pennsylvania, and another in Kentucky. In his collected lyrics, Robert Hunter says in a footnote to this song: “The best compliment I ever had on a lyric was from an old guy who'd worked at the Cumberland mine. He said, 'I wonder what the guy who wrote this song would've thought if he'd ever known something like the Grateful Dead was gonna do it.'" I half suspect that Hunter made this story up, but the lyrics do sound legitimately folkloric. In his Pitchfork review of Workingman's Dead, Steven Thomas Erlewine compares Hunter's lyrics on the album to Robbie Robertson's writing with the Band, because both of them have that plausibly timeless Americana quality.

Casual listeners to this tune have to grapple with the fact that Jerry, Bobby and Phil are not excellent three-part harmony singers. Steven Thomas Erlewine chooses to look at the bright side: "The trio’s voices don’t quite mesh, sometimes hitting a dissonant chord, sometimes scrambling for the same note; their effort isn’t merely heard, it’s felt. All that fumbling winds up as an asset on Workingman’s Dead, adding a bit of messiness to the tight performances." If I'm in the right mood, I experience that messiness as authenticity rather than sloppiness or indifference, but I can easily understand people who just find it off-putting.