To Lay Me Down

Listen while you read:  Cover: Perfume Genius, Sharon Von Etten & Friends

To lay me down once more
To lay me down with my head in sparkling clover
Let the world go by, all lost in dreaming
To lay me down one last time
To lay me down

To be with you once more
To be with you with our bodies close together
Let the world go by like clouds a-streaming
To lay me down one last time
To lay me down

To lie with you once more
To lie with you with our dreams entwined together
To lie beside you, my love still sleeping
To tell sweet lies one last time
And say good night

To lay me down . . . 

~  Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia

I try to write these posts the day before they are posted, so I am writing this one on August 1, even though you may be reading it on August 2. That's important only because today (August 1) would have been Jerry Garcia's 75th birthday. In honor of Jerry, I put the five CDs of Day of the Dead (2016) on my stereo and turned up the outside speakers. The covers of The Grateful Dead accompanied me through four hours of heavy-duty gardening, cleaning  up a perennial bed that I've neglected for two years. And then the heat and the bugs drove me inside. But this song stayed with me.

Robert Hunter wrote the lyrics to this one in London in 1970 "over a half-bottle of retsina." Written in the same session were "Ripple" and "Brokedown Palace." Quite a productive afternoon, I'd say. "To Lay Me Down" appears on Garcia (1972) and Reckoning (1981), but I chose this cover because it moved me. Considering that I don't even know who Perfume Genius is, and I don't really like Sharon Von Etten, that's saying something.

So that's it. I just wanted to honor Jerry. And tell someone I'm missing him. And if you read that as a double entendre, A+ to you.