“Let Me Sing Your Blues Away”

Keyboard player Keith Godchaux wrote the music, with words by Robert Hunter. It is the only song he co-wrote for the Grateful Dead, and the only one on a Dead album with Keith singing lead. The band recorded it in August 1973 for Wake of the Flood, with Martín Fierro on saxophone, and that October it became the very first single on the band’s own label, Grateful Dead Records, with “Here Comes Sunshine” on the other side. Onstage it lasted just six shows, all in September 1973: each verse moves to a different key, and the Dead let it go. Decades later, Phil Lesh & Friends and Joe Russo’s Almost Dead brought it back to the stage.