In Memoriam pays tribute to those who have left this world, and the songs they left us to remember them by.
Gary Mounfield, who performed as Mani, died on November 20 in his beloved home town of Manchester, four days after he turned 63.
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In Memoriam pays tribute to those who have left this world, and the songs they left us to remember them by.
When it was announced that Donna Jean Thatcher Godchaux-MacKay passed away on Nov. 2, 2025, the obituaries and tributes came pouring in, as befitting a Rock N’ Roll Hall of Famer and member of the legendary rock band the Grateful Dead.
The story of her life and work has been well documented. Born in Alabama, she got her start as a professional singer in her teens doing session work in Muscle Shoals and Memphis. In this role, she backed up the likes of Percy Sledge on “When A Man Loves A Woman” and Elvis Presley on “Suspicious Minds” (more on that later).
She and her first husband Keith Godchaux moved to San Francisco, where Donna Jean literally talked their way into the Grateful Dead in 1971. With Keith on keyboards and Donna Jean on vocals, the two were part of the band until 1979. Together they appeared on every studio album of the era. They also performed at many of the band’s most iconic shows, such as Veneta (Oregon) in 1972, Barton Hall at Cornell University in 1977, the Great Pyramids in Egypt in 1978, and the Closing of the Winterland on Dec. 31, 1978.
The best way to describe Donna Jean’s role is to say she was a singer in the band. While she wasn’t a traditional rock n’ roll frontwoman like Grace Slick or Debbie Harry, she did sing lead on a handful of songs, including “Sunrise” and “From the Heart of Me.” She also sang co-lead alongside Bob Weir on classic tracks “The Music Never Stopped” and the live version of “Sugar Magnolia/Sunshine Daydream” on Europe ‘72. She sang backup on countless tunes, putting her stamp on many live performances. Even when she wasn’t singing, she was often front and center on stage, moving with the music, both inspiring and emulating the crowd.
Like all aspects of Grateful Dead lore, her time in the band is a matter of endless debate with Deadheads. Some love her, some hate her. Though she was a great singer in her own right, her voice did not always mesh well with those of other members of the band. This was complicated by the fact Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir weren’t always singing on key (or even the right words). She acknowledged these shortcomings in multiple interviews.
Still, to hear Donna Jean’s voice on a Dead song means you can easily identify the era. As Dead drummer Bill Kreutzmann wrote last week: “She was very much woven into the Dead’s tie-dyed tapestry during the ‘70s — and some of those years remain my all-time favorite of the Grateful Dead. Which means that some of my favorite music that I ever made with the Grateful Dead was made with Donna.”
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In Memoriam pays tribute to those who have left this world, and the songs they left us to remember them by.
It’s five years today since the death of Peter Green, the architect of the initial blues-facing iteration of Fleetwood Mac. A reputable and reliable guitarist, he was the one the original bluesmen looked up to, holding his play in greater regard than some lesser “gods” as, say, Eric Clapton. Albert King, that giant of U.S. electric blues said of him “He has the sweetest tone I ever heard; he was the only one who gave me the cold sweats.” For five years, as the ’60s blossomed into the ’70’, he was the man.
When Clapton left behind John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers to form Cream in 1966, this left a sizeable hole. It was Green, a very quiet and somewhat reserved Londoner, still only 19 years old, who was drafted in, based on his burgeoning reputation. His time with Mayall was short, around a year, and he contributed a couple of compositions to the album released during that period, A Hard Road. One of these, “The Supernatural,” displayed his early knack for crafting an instrumental.
In 1967, he jumped ship to form his own band, naming them after the rhythm section rather than himself, drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John “Mac” McVie, each also graduates of the Mayall finishing school for British blues-rockers. It seems he felt Mayall, the Godfather of British Blues, was straying too far from blues orthodoxy. The fourth member was Jeremy Spencer, an adept practitioner of the Elmore James style of slide guitar. Both Green and Spencer wrote, each contributing to their first eponymous album, with Green contributing 5 to Spencers 3, the rest bulked out by covers.
By second album, Mr Wonderful, Green had begun to hit his stride, and contributed a greater proportion, mainly co-writes with C.G. Adams, aka Clifford Davis, the band’s manager, later to be seen as somewhat a malign influence. However, the critics were cooler in their response, there needing to be a greater step-up. That duly came, coinciding with the band becoming a five-piece, recruiting a third guitarist, in Danny Kirwan. Singles were a bigger thing than albums back in those days, and it was with a bevy of non-album releases that the band really hit pay-dirt. Beginning with “Black Magic Woman” and a relatively lowly UK chart position of 37 in 1968, the quintet moved swiftly forward, onward and upward. Apart from the cover, “Need Your Love So Bad,” which came next, it was all Green originals paving the way. This culminated with the evergreen and mercurial “Albatross” followed by “Man of the World” and “Oh Well,” a #1 and two #2’s, ’68 into ’69. (“Oh Well” was actually the first to dent America, becoming a #55 on Billboard.)
The plot had begun to unravel by the time a further LP release, Then Play On, and it showed Green deferring much of the songwriting to his new recruit, although a further non album single, “The Green Manalishi (with the Two Prong Crown)” came, from Green, in 1970. It is fair to say the title gives some clue as to where his mind was at. Green quit the band, in part initiated by his addled desire that the band donate all and any profit to charity.
His later years were besmirched, possibly the wrong word, by various demons, well documented elsewhere. Although he did regain and, partly, restore his career, if not so much his reputation, it is those classic years that remain his legacy and that we celebrate here. (If you seek the sores and suffering, this is as good a summary as any.)
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In Memoriam pays tribute to those who have left this world, and the songs they left us to remember them by.
Songwriter Brian Wilson in Santa Monica California 1990
God only knows where we’d be without Brian Wilson.
If that sounds glib, a journalistic play on one of his best-known tunes, think it through. The footprint made by Brian Douglas Wilson, who died on June 11, nine days short of his 83rd birthday, is amongst the largest of any single musician from the 1960s, certainly of those born his side of the Atlantic. As a writer and producer his skill was exemplary, but remember also his angelic voice, arguably the second finest in his family (his brother Carl just one step ahead in those stakes, to my mind).
Whilst it had seemed he had been long gone, trapped in his own mind, if still being paraded out by management, friends and family, the pain of his actual departure from this world is both profound and shocking. Few musicians have had as much scrutiny over the years, with books and films aplenty, all documenting the highs and lows of a life lived largely in the public eye. From the start, the bedeviled saga of the Beach Boys has attracted equal parts adoration and opprobrium, the former usually reserved for Wilson, the latter for those who sought to take advantage of his often precarious mental health.
And what highs and what lows there have been. But we at Cover Me have come to praise his genius, rather than rake over those coals; there will be plenty of that elsewhere. One of only two musicians to get two birthday “salutes” from us, here and here, his legacy was also rightly celebrated in our deep dive into the best 40 covers of songs by his band, the Beach Boys. Sure, he didn’t write them all, but certainly had a hand in the vast majority of the best ones.
Add in a welter of album reviews for the myriad tributes to him, personally and/or The Beach Boys, and it is obvious as to quite how well regarded he was, here and everywhere. I typed “Brian Wilson” into our site search engine and it delivered 16 pages, with “Beach Boys” providing 31. Even if you allow for some duplication, that is quite staggering. As such we need, and Brian Wilson deserves, a last hurrah, a valedictory victory parade of the bounty left in his wake, with the Beach Boys and without. Here is a baker’s dozen of his best.
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In Memoriam pays tribute to those who have left this world, and the songs they left us to remember them by.
Whilst it is now many a long year since the last active members of the Band threw in the towel, it is surely now appropriate to give a collective eulogy to this epochal and iconic band, now that the last surviving member, also the eldest, has died. Garth Hudson, the extravagantly bearded professorial figure behind his faithful Lowrey organ, left the earth last week, aged 87. It would be nice to hope the rest of the band have had time to patch up their differences, and that Valhalla is shaking once more to the mighty sound of the five-piece in their prime. For Hudson (1937 – 2025), Robbie Robertson (1943 – 2023), Levon Helm (1940 – 2012), Rick Danko (1943 – 1999) and Richard Manuel (1943 – 1986) were like no other band, before or since.
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In Memoriam pays tribute to those who have left this world, and the songs they left us to remember them by.
It seems only fitting that a band known as the Grateful Dead would have so many songs about death. In fact, whenever a member of the Dead universe passes, there’s no shortage of songs to pay tribute to the one newly departed.
Such was the case with the passing of Phil Lesh on October 25, 2024. In the hours and days afterwards, many bands took to the stage with heartfelt tributes to the Dead’s bass player. Perhaps most notable was the jamband Phish, who, that same night, performed a cover of “Box of Rain,” a song co-written by Lesh and Robert Hunter.
The song holds the distinction of being the last track the Grateful Dead ever performed live before the passing of Jerry Garcia. Lesh added it to the band’s July 9, 1995 setlist at Soldier’s Field because he felt the song “Black Muddy River,” another song about death, was too melancholy to end the show and the tour on.
While Lesh will first and foremost always be remembered for his time in the Dead as one of the most innovative rock n’ roll bass players of all time, it’s what he did in the 29 years after Jerry’s passing that might be his greatest legacy.
Lesh kept the spirit of the Dead’s music alive by playing and collaborating with multiple generations of musicians. He helped ensure that not only would the Dead’s music live on, but that there would be many great musicians to play the music in the band’s open-ended style.
“I continue to seek out multiple musical partners, in a quest for that elusive chemistry that comes and goes as it wishes,” Lesh wrote in his 2005 memoir. “Sometimes ‘it’ happens onstage, or sometimes in rehearsal, but it always leaves me breathless and wonder-struck.”