Donna Jean

Rich Mahan (0:05)

The Good Ol Grateful Deadcast, the official podcast of the Grateful Dead. I'm Rich Mahan with Jesse Jarnow, exploring the music and legacy of the Grateful Dead for the Committed And The Curious.

Hello, friends. Welcome back to The Good Ol Grateful Deadcast. We've got a special one for you today. Our sole guest is the one and only Donna Jean Godchaux-MacKay, here to tell her story of a life well spent making music. Don't forget, all through this season, season four, you can get new episodes of The Good Ol Grateful Deadcast right here every other week.

Visit us at our website, dead.net/deadcast, and check out the extra materials we have for you to explore for this episode. Also at dead.net/deadcast are all of our past episodes, including the complete seasons one, two, and three. And you can link from there to any and all of the podcasting platforms available so you can listen where you like to listen. We also have our three St. Louis episodes there for you. So if you missed those, make sure to check it out. They dive heavily into the music from the new St. Louis Listen To The River box set, which is out now, and includes seven previously unreleased concerts from St. Louis recorded on December 9th and 10th, 1971 at the Fox Theater, October 17th, 18th, and 19th, 1972 at the Fox Theater, and the October 29th and 30th, 1973 shows at the Keele Auditorium. It's production of this 20 CD box set. The packaging is, you have to see it to believe it. It's beautiful. It's limited to 13,000 individually numbered copies and will also be available in its entirety as a digital download, exclusively at dead.net in Apple, Lostless and FLAC 19224

dead.net will also exclusively release Light into Ashes, Fox Theater, St. Louis, Missouri, 10, 1872 as a double LP on 180 gram custom vinyl. This one's limited to 7200 copies and this set focuses on an exceptional hour plus jam plucked from The Dead's October 18th, 72 show at The Fabulous Fox.

The breakout show from this box set is Fox Theater, St. Louis, Missouri, 12, 10, 71 It's available as a three CD set and as a limited edition five LP set also on 180 gram vinyl. For more information on any of these configurations of Listen To The River, St. Louis, 71, 72, 73, just truck on over to dead.net. Well, most folks know that Donna Jean Godchaux-MacKay was a member of the Grateful Dead for most of the 70s. She and her husband, Keith Godchaux, are an important part of the band through what many people will agree was their most creative and prolific era. But did you know before she moved to California and got on the bus that she was an in-demand session vocalist on a multitude of hit records? Get ready for an in-depth look at the musical life of Donna Jean Godchaux-MacKay. Now let's get this story started with your friend and mine, Jesse Jarnow.

Jesse Jarnow (3:53)

Donna Jean Godchow sang with the Grateful Dead from early 1972 through early 1979 But you probably already knew that.

But before that, she was Donna Thatcher.

That was On The Rocks from Tim Davis' album Pipe Dream. Her last credit is Donna Thatcher, probably recorded in 1971, just before meeting the Grateful Dead. It was an epilogue to the first phase of an already illustrious career that began in the early 60s, around the same time the Warlocks were starting to figure out how to play together. There were a lot of differences between the early careers of The Grateful Dead and Donna Thatcher. Perhaps the biggest is that she could be heard on radio stations and jukeboxes coast to coast.

Donna Jean Godchaux-MacKay (6:00)

Thank you Here's the last one to know. Oh, oh, oh.

I sure if can me. I sure me.

Jesse Jarnow (6:24)

And all hell broke loose.

Donna Jean Godchaux-MacKay (6:27)

My dad played a little guitar and sang a little. And he and his sister used to sing on the radio in Texas somewhere. But not really, you know, on a big scale at all. I couldn't tell you when or what station or even what town or anything. But I know that daddy told me that he and Dixie sang, he played guitar and they both sang on a radio show. And I don't think it was like, you know, a weekly show or something like that, but they had maybe sung a couple of times or something on some radio show. And I couldn't tell you where that was at. But I remember my dad sitting with a guitar many, many, many times and playing guitar, you know, at our house. But as far as a musical family, outside of my dad playing guitar, I don't know where I fell off the truck. But my mother's side of the family are all super intellectuals. They're all business owners. My mother's sisters and brothers, my mother's brother was a NASA brain trust, and he helped develop the wheels for the moon buggy that went on the moon. And he did so many, so many things that he never told anybody because everything was so top secret. We didn't know anything about him almost until he died. And Wernher von Braun came to his funeral and people were talking about what he had done. He invented, my uncle invented the heart monitor for NASA. That's when it was first used and my uncle invented it. And so all of my uncles were like that, very intellectual and engineers.