“Ripple” by The Grateful Dead

Robert Hunter wrote the words to "Ripple" in London in 1970, on the same afternoon he wrote "Brokedown Palace" and "To Lay Me Down", and Jerry Garcia gave it a melody gentle enough to sing around a campfire. It landed on the Grateful Dead's American Beauty that year and doubled as the B-side of "Truckin'", after the band first played it at the Fillmore West in San Francisco on August 18, 1970.

This is the Dead at their gentlest and most open-hearted, folk rock with dust on its boots. David Grisman's mandolin sparkles over the strummed guitars, Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart keep the rhythm light, and the voices blend like old friends on a porch. Whole essays have been written picking apart its lyric, it closed out the final scene of Freaks and Geeks, and Rolling Stone placed it at number 334 on its 500 Greatest Songs of All Time in 2024.

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