“If I Had the World to Give”

Jerry Garcia wrote the music and Robert Hunter the words for this tender torch song, unlike almost anything else the Grateful Dead recorded. It appeared on Shakedown Street in November 1978, an album produced by Lowell George and John Kahn. Onstage it was a true rarity: the Dead played it just three times, at Red Rocks in Colorado that August, at Winterland in San Francisco in October, and in Cleveland that November. Its soaring melody was hard to sing, and by the end of the year the band set it aside for good. Nearly forty years later, on November 25, 2017, Dead & Company brought it back in Columbus, Ohio, with Oteil Burbridge singing the lead.