“Morning Dew” by The Grateful Dead

"Morning Dew" started out as a folk song by the Canadian singer-songwriter Bonnie Dobson, who put it on Bonnie Dobson at Folk City in 1962; her original was a solo performance, just her voice and a fingerpicked acoustic guitar. The Grateful Dead plugged it in. For their debut album, The Grateful Dead, out in March 1967, they worked it up into an electric arrangement for the full band, with Jerry Garcia singing lead, David Hassinger producing and Dick Bogert engineering.

The words imagine a conversation in a world left behind by a nuclear holocaust, and what was a hushed folk lament turns heavier and more haunted once the amplifiers get hold of it: a doomsday ballad with the volume up.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.