Ike and Tina Turner Archives

In Memoriam: Donna Godchaux-MacKay

Posted by Curtis Zimmermann at 10:00 am No Responses »

Nov 142025

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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Five Good Covers: “Help Me Make It Through the Night” (Kris Kristofferson)

Posted by Patrick Robbins at 3:00 pm 3 Responses »

Oct 042024

Five Good Covers presents five cross-genre reinterpretations of an oft-covered song.

Help Me Make It Through the Night covers

Kris Kristofferson’s resume may be one of the most remarkable documents of 20th century music. With his passing earlier this week at the age of 88, it was de rigueur for all In Memoriam pieces to bring it up. The man was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, a Golden Gloves boxer, and a prizewinning short story writer. He was a US Army veteran, a helicopter pilot, and an award-winning actor. He could quote William Blake from memory, and he could rip Toby Keith a blistered new one. And, of course, he gifted the world with truly classic songs, plain poetry that dazzled in its simplicity and its emotional heft. He truly was, as he wrote in “The Pilgrim Chapter 33,” a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction.

“I’m for anything that gets you through the night,” said Frank Sinatra in a 1963 interview with Playboy, “be it prayer, tranquilizers or a bottle of Jack Daniels.” Kristofferson, struggling to finish writing a song in the Gulf of Mexico, came back to that line and used it as the linchpin for “Help Me Make It Through the Night.” The song was about a one-night stand and therefore wore controversy on its back like a target. But the words were so plainspoken and intimate, the need far more naked than the girl, that people fell over themselves running to cover the story of a man all alone with his heart, no matter who else was in the room.

Five Good Covers: “You Are My Sunshine”

Posted by Seuras Og at 1:00 pm No Responses »

May 102024

Five Good Covers presents five cross-genre reinterpretations of an oft-covered song.

“You Are My Sunshine” is an old warhorse of a song. It’s been around for so long and in so many forms as to, now, be quite beyond categorization. Until recently it has been unfairly parked under hokey old cornball music for old folk, even if the many cheesier versions out there have deserved and drawn such scorn. I know that I thought it dreadful old nonsense, until I was recently forced to accept and re-evaluate it as a song of some pathos and persuasion. You may still share my earlier view, so I put it to you: Can any of these covers shift that opinion?

The 75 Best Beatles Covers Ever

Posted by Staff at 9:00 am 23 Responses »

Feb 232024

‘The Best Covers Ever’ series counts down our favorite covers of great artists.

Sixty years ago this month, The Beatles played on the Ed Sullivan Show. You don’t need us to tell you what a momentous occasion this was; entire books have been written on the subject. Suffice to say we’re using the anniversary as our excuse to finally devote a Best Covers Ever to perhaps the biggest band of them all. We’ve done Dylan. We’ve done the Stones. We’ve done Dolly and Springsteen and Prince. But there was one last giant remaining.

Though it’s difficult to measure this precisely, The Beatles are the most-covered artist of all time according to the two biggest covers databases on the internet (SecondHandSongs, WhoSampled). And that certainly feels right. “Yesterday” is often cited as the most-covered song of all time, though that needs qualifiers (a ton of Christmas standards would beat it). But, again, it feels right. The Beatles were ubiquitous in their day, and they’ve been ubiquitous ever since. They just had a chart-topping single last month, the A.I.-assisted “Now and Then,” which was duly covered widely. If “Carnival of Light” ever surfaces, no doubt a carnival of covers will soon follow. Continue reading »

In Memoriam: Otis Redding

Posted by Patrick Robbins at 11:30 am 2 Responses »

Sep 092022

In Memoriam pays tribute to those who have left this world, and the songs they left us to remember them by.

This year, a lot of musical artists turn 81 years old. Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Neil Diamond, Aaron Neville, Paul Simon, David Crosby–the list goes on. But it’s one shorter than it should be. Otis Redding would be 81 today if he hadn’t died in a plane crash almost 55 years ago. Thinking of how much potential we never got to see fulfilled is a fool’s errand, so let’s focus on what Redding did give us in his 26 years and change.

Redding brought a voice full of emotion, an electric stage presence, and sheer drive to the sweet soul music of the ’60s. His work ethic got him to the top; his talent kept him there, long after he passed away. He’s one of those singers who’s always ripe for discovery; for an encouraging look at our future, search “first time hearing Otis Redding” on YouTube to find the next generation doing just that.

The Best Cover Songs of 1991

Posted by Ray Padgett at 7:00 am 1 Response »

Nov 012021

As regular readers know, every year, at the end of the year, we do a big year-end covers list. This tradition started in 2007 and will continue in a couple months with the best covers of 2021.

But there are so many years before 2007 where we weren’t doing year-end covers lists (and, as far as I’m aware, no one else was either). So once a year, we do a big anniversary post tackling the best covers of a year before Cover Me was born. So far we’ve done 1969, 1978, 1987, 1996, and, last year, 2000.

And for 2021, we look back thirty years, to the heady days of 1991. The days of grunge and acid house, of parachute pants and ripped denim, of The Gulf War and Home Alone. Country music and hip-hop increased their cultural dominance (or really just making their existing dominance known; 1991 is also the year Soundscan made the Billboard charts more authoritative). In a single day, Nirvana released Nevermind, Red Hot Chili Peppers released Blood Sugar Sex Magik, and A Tribe Called Quest released The Low End Theory. Think that’s a fluke? The week before saw massive albums from Mariah Carey, Hole, and Guns ‘n’ Roses (two albums, no less). The week before that came Garth Brooks, Talk Talk, and Saint Etienne.

All of those trends are reflected in the list below. Many of these covers scream “1991!” LL Cool J raps Disney. Courtney Love shrieks Joni. Aretha Franklin tries to new jack swing. A spate of early tribute albums (in fact, last year I wrote a 33 1/3 book about a 1991 tribute album). Other covers are more timeless, from veteran artists doing great work several decades into their careers, or way-underground artists who never even approached the mainstream. The only criteria was quality. Thirty years later, these 50 covers Hole-d up the best.

Check out the list starting on Page 2, and stay tuned for the best covers of this year coming in December.

The list begins on Page 2.