The trio met at a party and quickly assembled a group of the best and coolest people they could think of to play with and jokingly tossed a CD of their efforts to some of the people who ran the Grateful Dead. Mandolin player Paul Kotapish had also heard the cool underpinnings of the British Isles pervading certain Garcia/Hunter songs. Harper Maureen Brennan, part of the acclaimed Harpistry collection, would toss bits and pieces of Dead songs into gigs on the harp to amuse herself when she thought no one was listening. I remember thinking, ‘WHOA…this is something worth noticing.’”ĭanny wasn’t the only one to make the connection. I was playing a reel and “China Cat Sunflower” came on and I found myself locking in with the two guitar licks of Garcia and Weir. “I was listening to the Grateful Dead really loud, practicing my fiddle, walking in circles in the living room when I first discovered it,” said Danny. “We weren’t pounding a Grateful Dead square peg into a Celtic round hole because there was already such overlap and so much mutual respect for the various traditions,” he says. Founding member Danny Carnahan, vocalist, fiddler, and Grammy-nominated songwriter, explains. For the perfect pairing of Grateful Dead and traditional Celtic sound, look to Wake the Dead, a California group of experts musicians.įor almost 17 years, Wake the Dead has dug deep into the canon of Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter, releasing their fourth album, Deal, this past fall.

China cat sunflower mandolin and guitar