42 Shows in 30 Years: The Dead’s Most Avoided Song

Ripple was the Grateful Dead’s most beloved song — and one of their rarest. Jerry Garcia wrote the melody on railroad tracks near Saskatoon, barely rehearsed it, and the band played it maybe 40 times in 30 years and 2,400 shows.

Robert Hunter wrote the lyrics in London in 1970 at Alan Trist’s flat on Devonshire Terrace — the same afternoon he wrote “Brokedown Palace” and “To Lay Me Down,” all three death songs disguised as benedictions. A month later on the Festival Express train across Canada, Jerry Garcia grabbed Bob Weir’s acoustic guitar, sat on the tracks near Saskatoon at sunrise, and set “Ripple” to music. They recorded it that August at Wally Heider’s studio for American Beauty, with David Grisman on mandolin.

Then the Grateful Dead let it go. Ripple demanded sincerity without escape — the opposite of everything Garcia’s improvisation-first aesthetic was built on. It came back briefly in 1980 during the Warfield acoustic shows, surfaced once in 1988, and never appeared in a full-band setlist again. Bob Weir started playing Ripple at hospital bedsides, no cameras, no audience. In January 2026, 25,000 people sang it at Civic Center Plaza for Weir’s memorial — the song the Dead abandoned became everyone else’s way of saying goodbye.