"By her own admission, Donna Jean Godchaux was not a fan of the Grateful Dead when she arrived in California then Donna Jean Thatcher in 1970. Already a music industry veteran at 23, she had spent five years as a member of Southern Comfort, a group of singers regularly employed as backing vocalists at the renowned Fame studios in her native Alabama."
"But she was rigidly unimpressed with her San Francisco friends' undying devotion to Jerry Garcia and co. She hated the band's name and loudly opined that the only reason people liked them was because they were invariably out of their minds on drugs when they went to see them live. In fact, she could prove she was right: she offered to attend a Dead show sober, certain she would hate it. It proved a fateful decision."
"By the end of the Dead's set at the Winterland Ballroom, Thatcher ostensibly retired from music had announced: If I sing again, it will be with this band. Through attending other Dead shows she met a local pianist named Keith Godchaux, whom she subsequently married, and after meeting Garcia and angling for him to give her new husband a job, she found herself hired as well."
Donna Jean Godchaux arrived in California in 1970 as Donna Jean Thatcher and initially disliked the Grateful Dead. She attended a Dead show sober intending to hate it, but by the end of the Winterland Ballroom set she declared she would sing only with that band. She met pianist Keith Godchaux at other shows, married him, and both were hired after she persuaded Jerry Garcia to give Keith a job. Godchaux sang on stage during Europe '72 after taking 15 hits of LSD. Her eight-year tenure with the Grateful Dead came to define her career despite earlier success as a Fame Studios backing vocalist on recordings by Elvis Presley, Percy Sledge, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, and Dionne Warwick. Her joining coincided with the Dead's roots-oriented shift on Workingman's Dead and American Beauty.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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