Here are a few other covers of the song by other artists. Paul Civic Center, though some people prefer the xxxx. John Kahn commented on the recording of the album in an interview: The album was supposed to be a Jerry Garcia Band album but it sort of fell apart in the middle, so it ended up being half that band and half Grateful Dead. My favorite version of the song is from the May 1977 concert at the St. 10. No one ever played the song better than the Grateful Dead. She later learns the soldier has died, having fallen in love with another woman in Louisiana. She declines, saying he is too poor, and he swears vengeance if he ever returns. The strange name caused Dylan to say in his intro, “"I've been around this whole country but I never yet found Fennario.” Maybe the Dead did find it, as they mentioned the place again on “Dire Wolf” on Working Man’s Dead.Īs they left Fennario, a captain called William falls in love with a young woman called Peggy, and asks for her hand in marriage. There’s no such place in the real world, and David Dodd points out in The Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics that it is probably derived from the British word “fen”, which refers to flat, muddy lands, especially around Cambridgeshire. “Pretty Peggy-O” tells the story of soldiers leaving a place called Fennario. Jerry recorded the song as “Fennario” on Run for the Roses. The band’s laid-back tempo gives it a classic Dead feel, like “Ship of Fools”. They played it on 265 known occasions, and Jerry’s gentle voice and searing guitar are perfect for the mellifluous drift of the ballad. The song in various forms was a standard in the early sixties by such Greenwich Village standard-bearers as Bob Dylan (who sang it on his debut album), Joan Baez, Simon and Garfunkel and Makem and Clancy.īut the Dead – especially Jerry Garcia – made this song their own. ( Here’s the original being sung by the terrific Scottish folk group, The Corries.) At some point, someone brought the song across the Atlantic and over the generations it evolved into Americana.
It was released as a five-disc LP on December 3, 2021. It was released by Arista Records as a two-disc CD in August 1991.
It was recorded in the spring and summer of 1990 at The Warfield in San Francisco. (album) Jerry Garcia Band is the second album, and first live album, by the Jerry Garcia Band. “Pretty Peggy-O” is an American folk song derived from the traditional Irish ballad “The Bonnie Lass of Fyvie”. Jerry Garcia Band (album) Jerry Garcia Band.