Dead Ahead

by James Hughes
March 26, 2008

Small-town Alabama girl, not long out of high school, journeys to the West Coast at the close of the ’60s. The Grateful Dead hired her and her newfound love. A decade later after her lover’s death, she raises their son, helps revive the band they started together, remarries, births another boy, winds up making music with the whole family—band mate husband and kids plus assorted gifted friends—and eventually makes her way home again.

Donna Jean Godchaux-McKay was already a hit singer when she left for California, having lent backup vocals to records by Aretha Franklin, Percy Sledge and others, often showing up for a recording session from cheerleading practice, still wearing her uniform.

Elvis brought her up to Memphis to sing on his 1969 comeback album. She sings on “Suspicious Minds” and “In the Ghetto,” and maybe also on “Kentucky Rain,” the sad, shimmering single from those same sessions. Is that really her echoing Elvis’s choked-up “walking through ... with the rain in my shoes?”

“I don’t remember,” Godchaux-McKay says today, laughing.

Who knows? “The Complete Grateful Dead Discography”—part of an exhaustive FAQ of all things Dead at http://www.stason.org —credits her (as Donna Jean Thatcher, her maiden name) with backing vocals on “Cold Kentucky Rain.” The authors also make the following claim, which, true or not, is mind-boggling:

Producers deleted her voice from the final mix of the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” (from “Let It Bleed”) because, so they say, she took the spotlight away from Mick Jagger’s singing.

And Carly Simon thought he was vain. One thing is certain: The Stones laid down early versions of “Wild Horses,” “Brown Sugar” and other signature numbers from their peak period in Muscle Shoals.

During the 1960s, Muscle Shoals aligned with Memphis and Nashville to form a sort of Golden Triangle of hit-record alchemy. Along with synthesizing the blues and country vibes of those two music towns—and in the process attracting recording artists from all over the country and beyond—the famous “Muscle Shoals sound” evolved largely out of Fame Studios and Muscle Shoals Sound, two production facilities where dozens of classic tracks were cut, such as Aretha’s “I Never Loved a Man the Way I Loved You” and Percy’s “When a Man Loves a Woman,” just to name a couple, and a song with spiritualness to spare, the Staple Singers “I’ll Take You There.” Not that Godchaux-McKay ever had anything against church; she belongs to one back in Alabama today. Maybe, on leaving home all those years ago, she was just looking for new ways to get the gospel.

Godchaux-McKay and first husband, Keith Godchaux, can be heard on just about everything the Grateful Dead and their concert-taping followers recorded in the ’70s, the heyday of the Dead. The newlyweds won over Jerry Garcia easily enough, but Godchaux-McKay struggled somewhat to find her place in the extended family—to overcome certain “presuppositions,” as she puts it, about her new-girl’s role. “Not to mention that I’d only ever done studio work up till then,” she adds. Still, her singing—and her husband’s piano playing—put new sweetness and swing in the band’s performances.

Toward the end of their tenure with the Dead, Godchaux-McKay says: “I was out (on) the road and I was eight-and-a-half-months pregnant. After Keith passed, our son Zion, when he was 7 years old, would come out and play drums.”

Mom is referring to the Heart of Gold Band, which she and husband Keith started in 1980 after leaving the Dead, and has regrouped variously over the years since he died. Zion Godchaux plays about half the instruments on the most recent Heart of Gold album. Godchaux-McKay’s husband, David McKay, is a longtime band member. And their son, Kinsman McKay, is in the latest lineup.

At a Gathering of the Vibes in 2005, Godchaux-McKay crossed paths with the Zen Tricksters, who’d long since established themselves as a dead-on-but-unafraid-to-innovate Dead tribute band. After sharing the stage at a Rex Foundation benefit two months later, they all decided to join together.

"It was mesmerizing, one of those magical experiences,” Godchaux-McKay says of that evening. “I stayed up all night, couldn’t get to sleep.”

The band’s sound is everything you’d expect from a group with ties to two illustrious music scenes as disparate (yet kindred-spirited) as Muscle Shoals and Haight-Ashbury: That tight-but-languid Staples Family groove; that San Francisco jam-band adventurousness; the big joyous ensemble sound; and vocal and instrumental interplay that characterizes both: In Donna Jean and the Tricksters, the two worlds merge together to form one solid musical union.

“I have no claim on this band. I love singing background as much as singing lead,” Godchaux-McKay says, and sure enough, the album is a true group effort, with everyone taking turns at the lead. It doesn’t ring glib when she adds, “And I love these people. They’re my family.”

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