Joan Baez recorded a version for her 1960 debut album, as did The Big 3, an American folk trio that featured Cass Elliot. Throughout the early 1960s the song gained popularity through folk performers, most notably The Kingston Trio, who included the song “Rider” on their album Sunny Side! in 1963. ![]() I also sang it in the west, in Wyoming/Tetons “Teton Tea Parties” and on the West Coast, especially in San Francisco and Los Angeles, late summer-early fall ‘59….Tossi Aaron learned the song from me in Philadelphia around 1959. I sang it a lot in folk circles around Philadelphia, in concerts, around Boston, mostly at the legendary Old Joe Clarke’s, and in Dartmouth Outing Club…circles, which took me around New York State and New England circa 1957-60. chordsTabs GRATEFUL DEAD: Friend Of The Devil, I Know You Rider, Uncle Johns Band, Ship Of Fools, Dire Wolf, Ripple, Cassidy, Ramble On Rose, Stella Blue, Casey Jones. I followed the tune given in Lomax, roughly but not exactly, changed the song from a woman’s to a man’s viewpoint, dropped two verses, and was its first arranger, voice and guitar in a heavy drag downbeat, sort of an early folk-rock sound. In the Lomax collection, the song is accompanied by the text “An eighteen- year-old black girl, in prison for murder, sang the tune and the first stanza of these blues.” Coltman recollected the resurrection of the song: The song was documented in John and Alan Lomax’s 1934 “ American Ballads and Folk Songs,” and revived in the mid 1950’s by Bob Coltman. ![]() ![]() Versions of “I Know You Rider” go back long before its earliest recordings by the Grateful Dead. Jerry Garcia, a lover of classic American tunes, made this folk classic a staple of the Dead’s live repertoire, almost always played as a medley following “ China Cat Sunflower.”
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