Grateful Dead - Brown-Eyed Women (2025) [Official Digital Download 24/192]

“Brown-Eyed Women,” a Garcia-Hunter song, was first played on August 23, 1971 at The Auditorium Theater in Chicago, about a month before the release of the Grateful Dead double live album, aka Skull and Roses, among other monikers. (Hey, this is a family blog!) It was last played by the band on July 6, 1995 at the Riverport Amphitheatre in Maryland Heights, Missouri, which made them miss playing it in Chicago by two days—that would have been an interesting symmetry. And it appeared on the Europe ’72 album, along with the most of the rest of the batch of new songs. It was incorrectly titled “Brown-Eyed Woman” on the album, a mistake which took awhile to rectify. It was played in concert 347 times.

Like “Jack Straw,” “Brown-Eyed Women” is set largely in the era of the Great Depression. It tells the story of a family living in a tumbledown shack in mythical Bigfoot County, somewhere back in the hills, it seems, where the family works the land and the father, Jack Jones, makes bootleg whisky. Jack was a ladies man in his youth, but those days are gone. It is a fairly straightforward tale of scraping by in hard times, where the mother, Delilah Jones, bears eight boys (no girls are mentioned, but an early version, on August 24, 1971 - the second performance of the song - mentions 13 children all told), of which four belong to two sets of twins. This is a couple whose attraction to each other is strong, clearly, and this is a woman who has done more than her share of childbearing and rearing. And when she dies, in the snowstorm that caves in the roof of the family home, Jack Jones is devastated - never the same again.

TRACKLIST

1. Grateful Dead - Brown-Eyed Women (Live at Winterland, San Francisco, CA, 3/20/1977)
2. Grateful Dead - Althea (Live at Hartford Civic Center, Hartford, CT, 3/14/1981)
3. Grateful Dead - The Music Never Stopped (Live at Philadelphia Spectrum, Philadelphia, PA, 5/13/1978)
4. Grateful Dead - Scarlet Begonias (Live at Greek Theatre, Berkeley, CA, 7/13/1984)
5. Grateful Dead - Touch of Grey (Live at Greek Theatre, Berkeley, CA, 7/13/1984)
6. Grateful Dead - Fire on the Mountain (Live at Greek Theatre, Berkeley, CA, 7/13/1984)



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