Good Shepherd (song)
Encyclopedia
"Good Shepherd" is a traditional song, most known as recorded by Jefferson Airplane
on their 1969 album Volunteers
. It was arranged and sung by the group's guitarist Jorma Kaukonen
, who described their interpretation of it as psychedelic folk-rock.
Called by nearly a dozen different names and with varying words, melodies and purpose but common themes, the song's history reflects many of the evolutionary changes and cross-currents of American music. It begins early in the 19th century with a backwoods preacher who wrote hymn
s, persists through that century, manifests itself in a 1930s gospel blues
recording done in a prison by a blind axe murderer, and sees use in the 1950s as a folk song, before attaining its realization by Jefferson Airplane. Several of these different variants of the song are still performed in the 21st century.
hymns during that time. He was referred to by the Nashville Banner
as the "wild man of Goose Creek", and was also variously known as "the poet of the backwoods" and "the Wild Man of Holston". Granade worked in part in the world of shape-note singing in the Shenandoah Valley
, where a variety of musical sources both sacred and profane were at play.
This new hymn had an immediate effect. A Thomas Griffin recalls hearing it in a Methodist meeting in Oglethorpe, Georgia
in 1808. He wrote that the singing of the hymn "made the flesh tremble on me, and caused an awful sense of the hereafter to press on my mind"; he converted to Christianity
a few days later. Granade's work can be seen in the 1817 hymnal
A Selection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs in Two Parts as "Come good shepherd, feed thy Sheep", while the first line of the hymn also makes an appearance in one Eleazer Sherman's 1832 memoir.
It then appeared in Joshua Leavitt
's popular and influential 1833 tunebook The Christian Lyre as "Let thy kingdom", associated to the tune "Good Shepherd" with an 8.7. metrical pattern
. It contained lines such as:
It appears in this form in several hymnals of the 1830s and 1840s, including one created by the Mormons. The most likely tune for it, however, would have been different from the eventual gospel blues one. Titled "The Good Shepherd" and with only two verses printed instead of the previous six or seven, it appeared again in an 1853 New England Christian Convention hymnal.
The hymn is on occasion still sung today.
is a complex topic that scholars often disagree on, while there was a more definite and direct influence of African-American spirituals upon the blues
.
In any case, the aging blind blues player Jimmie Strothers recorded the song, as "Keep Away from the Bloodstained Banders", for Alan Lomax
and Harold Spivacke on behalf of the Library of Congress
in June 1936. (The name was probably a corruption of "Blood Stained Bandits".) Strothers accompanied himself on four-string banjo, an instrument upon which his skill was well regarded. Coming from the Appalachia
n part of Virginia
, Strothers had lost his sight in a mine explosion and had made a living playing on street corners and in medicine show
s. Blind, itinerant street singers like Strothers were part of the tradition that kept African-American religious music alive. The recording was made at the Virginia State Prison Farm near Goochland, Virginia
, where Strothers was serving time for having murdered his wife with an axe. Lomax thought prisons were a good place to find old songs, and was also interested in illustrating the interaction of white and black music. This haunting recording was part of what Allmusic describes as a "group of songs that explore the boundaries between the sacred and the profane."
"Blood-stained Banders" has been called a "dark homily [that] bubbles up archaic invectives for the devil that huddles behind every stranger's face." Strothers' recording of "Blood-stained Banders" was described in the 1941 book Our Singing Country by Alan Lomax and his father John A. Lomax, with the transcription being done by Ruth Crawford Seeger
. The recording was released in 1942 by the Library of Congress as Archive of Folk Song, Recording Laboratory AFS L3 Folk Music of the United States: Afro American Spirituals, Work Songs and Ballads, a collection of field recordings including those by State Penitentiary and State Farm prisoners. It first appeared on 78 rpm records, then was released again on LP album
in the mid-1960s. In 1998, it was issued by Rounder Records
on Compact Disc
as Afro-American Spirituals, Work Songs & Ballads, which is also available from the Library of Congress
. It also appears on the CD The Ballad Hunter, Parts VII and VIII from the Library of Congress, originally issued as Archive of Folk Song, Recording Laboratory AFS L52 in 1941.
Transcribed in 2/2 time, the Strothers recording's rhythm and melody are somewhat similar but still measurably different from what would come later. Not a Negro spiritual per se, it was not listed in the top 500 spirituals in a listing of some 6,000 constructed by scholar John Lovell, Jr. in 1972.
collected and transcribed the song as "Don't You Hear The Lambs A-Crying" in her acclaimed volume American Folk Songs for Christmas. Dartmouth College
music professor Larry Polansky
comments that in doing so, Ruth Crawford Seeger took the hard-edged gospel blues and "revoice[d] it as a beautiful, shape-note influenced hymn."
The "Blood Stained Banders" form was then recorded by The Folksmiths in 1958 on their Folkways Records
LP We've Got Some Singing to Do. This was an effort organized by Joe Hickerson
, who would become director of the American Folklife Center
at the Library of Congress
. We've Got Some Singing to Do and its accompanying songbook were distributed to a number of summer camps, and were responsible for the popularization of several freedom-longing African-American songs such as "Kum Ba Yah". The song was circulating in folk circles in other forms as well, and Pete Seeger
published a variant with a more explicitly political message, called "If You Want To Go To Freedom", in the mimeographed-but-influential Broadside Magazine
in 1963.
Meanwhile, a recording of the Ruth Crawford Seeger "Don't You Hear The Lambs A-Crying" was done for the 1989 album American Folk Songs for Christmas by Peggy Seeger
, Mike Seeger
, and Penny Seeger. Dartmouth's Polansky then arranged the song under that title for strings in 1999, which was premiered at that year's Spoleto Music Festival.
The original strain of "Blood-Stained Banders" is still played; Bobby Horton recorded it in 2003 with an extended guitar part, as part of the soundtrack for the Ken Burns
documentary Horatio's Drive. Hickerson also still performs the tune in the first decade of the 21st century.
by folk singer Roger Perkins and friend Tom Hobson in the early 1960s. Kaukonen had grown up in Washington, D.C.
and around the world as the son of a diplomat, then had migrated to the San Francisco Bay Area
where he became a lover of various folk revival styles, especially acoustic blues and downhome blues. The song became part of Kaukonen's repertoire as he played around San Francisco clubs, well before he joined Jefferson Airplane. Kaukonen continued to evolve musically; the enticement of exploring the technology around the electric guitar led him to join the Airplane.
Now titled simply "Good Shepherd", a recording of the song became Kaukonen's major showcase number on the Airplane's 1969 Volunteers
album, where it avoided the political topicality of the most visible tracks on the rest of the album. "Good Shepherd" encompassed elements of both gospel and blues in its playing and showed that folk roots were still quite present in the Airplane's mixture of sounds and influences that led to psychedelic rock
. Indeed, folk music underlay many aspects of the San Francisco psychedelic sound, with the Airplane as a prime example. The recording of "Good Shepherd", which took place from late March to late June 1969, featured a rare Kaukonen lead vocal backed by mellow harmonies from the group. Its arrangement incorporated Kaukonen's sharp, stinging electric guitar lines set against an acoustic guitar opening, with singer Grace Slick
wordlessly doubling Kaukonen's guitar line during the instrumental break. The track was considered a beautiful standout on the album. Kaukonen himself later referred to it as "a great spiritual that I really liked. It's a psychedelic folk-rock song."
The arrangement was copyrighted by Kaukonen under BMI
and published by the Airplane's Icebag Corporation. Volunteers soon became a gold record and gave the song its greatest visibility since its early days as a hymn. Writer Craig Fenton
has described the Airplane "Good Shepherd" as "an ageless representation of genius". It was included on the band's 1970 greatest hits album The Worst of Jefferson Airplane
.
The song's first live performance by Jefferson Airplane was on May 7, 1969, in Golden Gate Park
in San Francisco, but with Grace Slick
singing lead and Kantner doing the backing vocal. Kaukonen would begin singing the lead two days later in Kansas City, and subsequently kept that role. The 2004 CD reissue of Volunteers included a live rendition of "Good Shepherd" as one of five live bonus tracks recorded November 28 and 29, 1969, at the Fillmore East
in New York
. This performance arrangement had no acoustic guitar part, but instead featured Kantner on electric guitar setting out a repeating but flexible pattern for the song, which Kaukonen then played against with his fills
and solos. The song was last played during the original Airplane era in 1972.
"Good Shepherd" was part of the set list
of the Airplane's 1989 reunion tour. It was included on the 1987/1990 Airplane compilation 2400 Fulton Street.
As Kaukonen and Airplane bassist Jack Casady
focused on the offshoot group Hot Tuna
beginning in the early 1970s, "Good Shepherd" became a regular entry in their performance repertoire. One such performance was included on their 2000 DVD Acoustic Blues Live at Sweetwater. Hot Tuna performances of the song would occasionally draw old Airplane members to join in. By 2004, it was often used as a vehicle for a solo bass excursion by Casady.
Besides Hot Tuna, renditions of "Good Shepherd" also appeared on Kaukonen's 1985 live album Magic
(and the 1995 expanded release Magic Two
), which contained selections from his solo acoustic performances; as one of Kaukonen's efforts on the 1999 Phil Lesh and Friends
live album Love Will See You Through
; and on the 2001 Jorma Kaukonen Trio Live
album.
In the first decade of the 21st century, the song continued to draw commentary from listeners. And Kaukonen continued to find meaning in performing "Good Shepherd" and other songs like it that celebrated religion in one context or another without preaching. He said this material gave him a doorway into scripture: "I guess you could say I loved the Bible without even knowing it. The spiritual message is always uplifting – it's a good thing."
Jefferson Airplane
Jefferson Airplane was an American rock band formed in San Francisco in 1965. A pioneer of the psychedelic rock movement, Jefferson Airplane was the first band from the San Francisco scene to achieve mainstream commercial and critical success....
on their 1969 album Volunteers
Volunteers (Jefferson Airplane album)
-Personnel:*Grace Slick – vocals, piano on "The Farm", "Hey Fredrick", "Eskimo Blue Day", and "Volunteers", organ on "Meadowlands", recorder on "Eskimo Blue Day"*Paul Kantner – vocals, rhythm guitar*Marty Balin – vocals, percussion...
. It was arranged and sung by the group's guitarist Jorma Kaukonen
Jorma Kaukonen
Jorma Ludwik Kaukonen Jr. is an American blues, folk, and rock guitarist, best known for his work with Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna.-Biography:...
, who described their interpretation of it as psychedelic folk-rock.
Called by nearly a dozen different names and with varying words, melodies and purpose but common themes, the song's history reflects many of the evolutionary changes and cross-currents of American music. It begins early in the 19th century with a backwoods preacher who wrote hymn
Hymn
A hymn is a type of song, usually religious, specifically written for the purpose of praise, adoration or prayer, and typically addressed to a deity or deities, or to a prominent figure or personification...
s, persists through that century, manifests itself in a 1930s gospel blues
Gospel blues
Gospel blues is a form of blues-based gospel music that has been around since the inception of blues music, a combination of blues guitar and evangelistic lyrics...
recording done in a prison by a blind axe murderer, and sees use in the 1950s as a folk song, before attaining its realization by Jefferson Airplane. Several of these different variants of the song are still performed in the 21st century.
Hymn
"Good Shepherd" originated in a very early 19th century hymn written by the Methodist Reverend John Adam Granade (1770–1807), "Let Thy Kingdom, Blessed Savior". Granade was a significant figure of the Great Revival in the American West during the 19th century's first decade, as the most important author of camp meetingCamp meeting
The camp meeting is a form of Protestant Christian religious service originating in Britain and once common in some parts of the United States, wherein people would travel from a large area to a particular site to camp out, listen to itinerant preachers, and pray...
hymns during that time. He was referred to by the Nashville Banner
Nashville Banner
The Nashville Banner is a defunct daily newspaper of Nashville, Tennessee, United States, which published from April 10, 1876 until February 20, 1998...
as the "wild man of Goose Creek", and was also variously known as "the poet of the backwoods" and "the Wild Man of Holston". Granade worked in part in the world of shape-note singing in the Shenandoah Valley
Shenandoah Valley
The Shenandoah Valley is both a geographic valley and cultural region of western Virginia and West Virginia in the United States. The valley is bounded to the east by the Blue Ridge Mountains, to the west by the eastern front of the Ridge-and-Valley Appalachians , to the north by the Potomac River...
, where a variety of musical sources both sacred and profane were at play.
This new hymn had an immediate effect. A Thomas Griffin recalls hearing it in a Methodist meeting in Oglethorpe, Georgia
Oglethorpe, Georgia
Oglethorpe is a city in Macon County, Georgia, United States. The population was 1,200 at the 2000 census. The city is the county seat of Macon County. It was named for Georgia's founder, James Oglethorpe. Oglethorpe was once one of the largest cities in Georgia, and by the 1850s, was tagged as...
in 1808. He wrote that the singing of the hymn "made the flesh tremble on me, and caused an awful sense of the hereafter to press on my mind"; he converted to Christianity
Conversion to Christianity
Conversion to Christianity is the religious conversion of a previously non-Christian person to some form of Christianity. It has been called the foundational experience of Christian life...
a few days later. Granade's work can be seen in the 1817 hymnal
Hymnal
Hymnal or hymnary or hymnbook is a collection of hymns, i.e. religious songs, usually in the form of a book. The earliest hand-written hymnals are known since Middle Ages in the context of European Christianity...
A Selection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs in Two Parts as "Come good shepherd, feed thy Sheep", while the first line of the hymn also makes an appearance in one Eleazer Sherman's 1832 memoir.
It then appeared in Joshua Leavitt
Joshua Leavitt
Rev. Joshua Leavitt was an American Congregationalist minister and former lawyer who became a prominent writer, editor and publisher of abolitionist literature. He was also a spokesman for the Liberty Party and a prominent campaigner for cheap postage...
's popular and influential 1833 tunebook The Christian Lyre as "Let thy kingdom", associated to the tune "Good Shepherd" with an 8.7. metrical pattern
Meter (poetry)
In poetry, metre is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse. Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse metre, or a certain set of metres alternating in a particular order. The study of metres and forms of versification is known as prosody...
. It contained lines such as:
- Let thy kingdom, blessed Savior,
- Come, and bid our jarring cease;
- Come, oh come! and reign for ever,
- God of love and Prince of peace;
- ...
- Some for Paul, some for Apollos,
- Some for Cephas—none agree;
- ...
- Not upheld by force or numbers,
- Come, good Shepherd, feed thy sheep.
It appears in this form in several hymnals of the 1830s and 1840s, including one created by the Mormons. The most likely tune for it, however, would have been different from the eventual gospel blues one. Titled "The Good Shepherd" and with only two verses printed instead of the previous six or seven, it appeared again in an 1853 New England Christian Convention hymnal.
The hymn is on occasion still sung today.
Gospel blues
By the 1880s, "Let Thy Kingdom, Blessed Savior" could be found in Marshall W. Taylor's hymnal of African American religious songs, A Collection of Revival Hymns and Plantation Melodies. It subsequently was transformed by the more general forces shaping American musical forms. The influence of Methodist hymns on Negro spiritualsSpiritual (music)
Spirituals are religious songs which were created by enslaved African people in America.-Terminology and origin:...
is a complex topic that scholars often disagree on, while there was a more definite and direct influence of African-American spirituals upon the blues
Blues
Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads...
.
In any case, the aging blind blues player Jimmie Strothers recorded the song, as "Keep Away from the Bloodstained Banders", for Alan Lomax
Alan Lomax
Alan Lomax was an American folklorist and ethnomusicologist. He was one of the great field collectors of folk music of the 20th century, recording thousands of songs in the United States, Great Britain, Ireland, the Caribbean, Italy, and Spain.In his later career, Lomax advanced his theories of...
and Harold Spivacke on behalf of the Library of Congress
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...
in June 1936. (The name was probably a corruption of "Blood Stained Bandits".) Strothers accompanied himself on four-string banjo, an instrument upon which his skill was well regarded. Coming from the Appalachia
Appalachia
Appalachia is a term used to describe a cultural region in the eastern United States that stretches from the Southern Tier of New York state to northern Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia. While the Appalachian Mountains stretch from Belle Isle in Canada to Cheaha Mountain in the U.S...
n part of Virginia
Virginia
The Commonwealth of Virginia , is a U.S. state on the Atlantic Coast of the Southern United States. Virginia is nicknamed the "Old Dominion" and sometimes the "Mother of Presidents" after the eight U.S. presidents born there...
, Strothers had lost his sight in a mine explosion and had made a living playing on street corners and in medicine show
Medicine show
Medicine shows were traveling horse and wagon teams which peddled "miracle cure" medications and other products between various entertainment acts. Their precise origins unknown, medicine shows were common in the 19th century United States...
s. Blind, itinerant street singers like Strothers were part of the tradition that kept African-American religious music alive. The recording was made at the Virginia State Prison Farm near Goochland, Virginia
Goochland, Virginia
Goochland is a census-designated place in and the county seat of Goochland County, Virginia, United States. The population as of the 2010 Census was 861. The community is also known as Goochland Courthouse or by an alternative spelling, Goochland Court House...
, where Strothers was serving time for having murdered his wife with an axe. Lomax thought prisons were a good place to find old songs, and was also interested in illustrating the interaction of white and black music. This haunting recording was part of what Allmusic describes as a "group of songs that explore the boundaries between the sacred and the profane."
- If you want to get to heaven
- ... Over on, the other shore
- Stay out of the way of the blood-stained bandit —
- Oh good shepherd,
- Feed my sheep.
- One for Paul, one for Silas ...
- One for to make, my heart rejoice.
- Can't you hear, my lambs acallin'?
- Oh good shepherd,
- Feed my sheep.
"Blood-stained Banders" has been called a "dark homily [that] bubbles up archaic invectives for the devil that huddles behind every stranger's face." Strothers' recording of "Blood-stained Banders" was described in the 1941 book Our Singing Country by Alan Lomax and his father John A. Lomax, with the transcription being done by Ruth Crawford Seeger
Ruth Crawford Seeger
Ruth Crawford Seeger , born Ruth Porter Crawford, was a modernist composer and an American folk music specialist.-Life:...
. The recording was released in 1942 by the Library of Congress as Archive of Folk Song, Recording Laboratory AFS L3 Folk Music of the United States: Afro American Spirituals, Work Songs and Ballads, a collection of field recordings including those by State Penitentiary and State Farm prisoners. It first appeared on 78 rpm records, then was released again on LP album
LP album
The LP, or long-playing microgroove record, is a format for phonograph records, an analog sound storage medium. Introduced by Columbia Records in 1948, it was soon adopted as a new standard by the entire record industry...
in the mid-1960s. In 1998, it was issued by Rounder Records
Rounder Records
Rounder Records, originally of Cambridge, Massachusetts, but now based in Burlington, Massachusetts, is a record label founded in 1970 by Ken Irwin, Bill Nowlin and Marian Leighton-Levy, while all three were still university students...
on Compact Disc
Compact Disc
The Compact Disc is an optical disc used to store digital data. It was originally developed to store and playback sound recordings exclusively, but later expanded to encompass data storage , write-once audio and data storage , rewritable media , Video Compact Discs , Super Video Compact Discs ,...
as Afro-American Spirituals, Work Songs & Ballads, which is also available from the Library of Congress
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...
. It also appears on the CD The Ballad Hunter, Parts VII and VIII from the Library of Congress, originally issued as Archive of Folk Song, Recording Laboratory AFS L52 in 1941.
Transcribed in 2/2 time, the Strothers recording's rhythm and melody are somewhat similar but still measurably different from what would come later. Not a Negro spiritual per se, it was not listed in the top 500 spirituals in a listing of some 6,000 constructed by scholar John Lovell, Jr. in 1972.
Folk
In 1953, Ruth Crawford SeegerRuth Crawford Seeger
Ruth Crawford Seeger , born Ruth Porter Crawford, was a modernist composer and an American folk music specialist.-Life:...
collected and transcribed the song as "Don't You Hear The Lambs A-Crying" in her acclaimed volume American Folk Songs for Christmas. Dartmouth College
Dartmouth College
Dartmouth College is a private, Ivy League university in Hanover, New Hampshire, United States. The institution comprises a liberal arts college, Dartmouth Medical School, Thayer School of Engineering, and the Tuck School of Business, as well as 19 graduate programs in the arts and sciences...
music professor Larry Polansky
Larry Polansky
Larry Polansky is a composer, guitarist, mandolinist, and a professor at Dartmouth College. He is a founding member and co-director of . He co-wrote HMSL with Phil Burk and David Rosenboom....
comments that in doing so, Ruth Crawford Seeger took the hard-edged gospel blues and "revoice[d] it as a beautiful, shape-note influenced hymn."
The "Blood Stained Banders" form was then recorded by The Folksmiths in 1958 on their Folkways Records
Folkways Records
Folkways Records was a record label founded by Moses Asch that documented folk, world, and children's music. It was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution in 1987, and is now part of Smithsonian Folkways.-History:...
LP We've Got Some Singing to Do. This was an effort organized by Joe Hickerson
Joe Hickerson
Joe Hickerson is a noted folk singer and songleader. For 35 years he was Librarian and Director of the Archive of Folk Song at the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress...
, who would become director of the American Folklife Center
American Folklife Center
The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC was created by Congress in 1976 "to preserve and present American Folklife" . The center includes the Archive of Folk Culture, established at the Library in 1928 as a repository for American folk music...
at the Library of Congress
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...
. We've Got Some Singing to Do and its accompanying songbook were distributed to a number of summer camps, and were responsible for the popularization of several freedom-longing African-American songs such as "Kum Ba Yah". The song was circulating in folk circles in other forms as well, and Pete Seeger
Pete Seeger
Peter "Pete" Seeger is an American folk singer and was an iconic figure in the mid-twentieth century American folk music revival. A fixture on nationwide radio in the 1940s, he also had a string of hit records during the early 1950s as a member of The Weavers, most notably their recording of Lead...
published a variant with a more explicitly political message, called "If You Want To Go To Freedom", in the mimeographed-but-influential Broadside Magazine
Broadside Magazine
Broadside Magazine was a small mimeographed publication founded in 1962 by Agnes "Sis" Cunningham and her husband, Gordon Friesen. Hugely influential in the folk-revival, it was often controversial. Issues of what is folk music, what is folk rock, and who is folk were roundly discussed and debated...
in 1963.
Meanwhile, a recording of the Ruth Crawford Seeger "Don't You Hear The Lambs A-Crying" was done for the 1989 album American Folk Songs for Christmas by Peggy Seeger
Peggy Seeger
Margaret "Peggy" Seeger is an American folksinger. She is also well known in Britain, where she lived for more than 30 years with her husband, singer and songwriter Ewan MacColl.- The first American period :...
, Mike Seeger
Mike Seeger
Mike Seeger was an American folk musician and folklorist. He was a distinctive singer and an accomplished musician who played autoharp, banjo, fiddle, dulcimer, guitar, mouth harp, mandolin, dobro, jaw harp, and pan pipes. Seeger, a half-brother of Pete Seeger, produced more than 30 documentary...
, and Penny Seeger. Dartmouth's Polansky then arranged the song under that title for strings in 1999, which was premiered at that year's Spoleto Music Festival.
The original strain of "Blood-Stained Banders" is still played; Bobby Horton recorded it in 2003 with an extended guitar part, as part of the soundtrack for the Ken Burns
Ken Burns
Kenneth Lauren "Ken" Burns is an American director and producer of documentary films, known for his style of using archival footage and photographs...
documentary Horatio's Drive. Hickerson also still performs the tune in the first decade of the 21st century.
Kaukonen and Jefferson Airplane
"Blood-Stained Banders" was thus the proximate source for what was taught to guitarist Jorma KaukonenJorma Kaukonen
Jorma Ludwik Kaukonen Jr. is an American blues, folk, and rock guitarist, best known for his work with Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna.-Biography:...
by folk singer Roger Perkins and friend Tom Hobson in the early 1960s. Kaukonen had grown up in Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
and around the world as the son of a diplomat, then had migrated to the San Francisco Bay Area
San Francisco Bay Area
The San Francisco Bay Area, commonly known as the Bay Area, is a populated region that surrounds the San Francisco and San Pablo estuaries in Northern California. The region encompasses metropolitan areas of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, along with smaller urban and rural areas...
where he became a lover of various folk revival styles, especially acoustic blues and downhome blues. The song became part of Kaukonen's repertoire as he played around San Francisco clubs, well before he joined Jefferson Airplane. Kaukonen continued to evolve musically; the enticement of exploring the technology around the electric guitar led him to join the Airplane.
Now titled simply "Good Shepherd", a recording of the song became Kaukonen's major showcase number on the Airplane's 1969 Volunteers
Volunteers (Jefferson Airplane album)
-Personnel:*Grace Slick – vocals, piano on "The Farm", "Hey Fredrick", "Eskimo Blue Day", and "Volunteers", organ on "Meadowlands", recorder on "Eskimo Blue Day"*Paul Kantner – vocals, rhythm guitar*Marty Balin – vocals, percussion...
album, where it avoided the political topicality of the most visible tracks on the rest of the album. "Good Shepherd" encompassed elements of both gospel and blues in its playing and showed that folk roots were still quite present in the Airplane's mixture of sounds and influences that led to psychedelic rock
Psychedelic rock
Psychedelic rock is a style of rock music that is inspired or influenced by psychedelic culture and attempts to replicate and enhance the mind-altering experiences of psychedelic drugs. It emerged during the mid 1960s among folk rock and blues rock bands in United States and the United Kingdom...
. Indeed, folk music underlay many aspects of the San Francisco psychedelic sound, with the Airplane as a prime example. The recording of "Good Shepherd", which took place from late March to late June 1969, featured a rare Kaukonen lead vocal backed by mellow harmonies from the group. Its arrangement incorporated Kaukonen's sharp, stinging electric guitar lines set against an acoustic guitar opening, with singer Grace Slick
Grace Slick
Grace Slick is an American singer and songwriter, who was one of the lead singers of the rock groups The Great Society, Jefferson Airplane, Jefferson Starship, and Starship, and was a solo artist, for nearly three decades, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s...
wordlessly doubling Kaukonen's guitar line during the instrumental break. The track was considered a beautiful standout on the album. Kaukonen himself later referred to it as "a great spiritual that I really liked. It's a psychedelic folk-rock song."
The arrangement was copyrighted by Kaukonen under BMI
Broadcast Music Incorporated
Broadcast Music, Inc. is one of three United States performing rights organizations, along with ASCAP and SESAC. It collects license fees on behalf of songwriters, composers, and music publishers and distributes them as royalties to those members whose works have been performed...
and published by the Airplane's Icebag Corporation. Volunteers soon became a gold record and gave the song its greatest visibility since its early days as a hymn. Writer Craig Fenton
Craig Fenton
Craig Fenton is an author, historian, public speaker, and radio personality specializing in 1960’s and 1970’s music.For two decades he was a radio disc-jockey, frequent public speaker, and host for station events....
has described the Airplane "Good Shepherd" as "an ageless representation of genius". It was included on the band's 1970 greatest hits album The Worst of Jefferson Airplane
The Worst of Jefferson Airplane
The Worst of Jefferson Airplane is the first ever compilation album from the rock band Jefferson Airplane, released in November 1970. The album features all of Jefferson Airplane's hit singles up to that point...
.
The song's first live performance by Jefferson Airplane was on May 7, 1969, in Golden Gate Park
Golden Gate Park
Golden Gate Park, located in San Francisco, California, is a large urban park consisting of of public grounds. Configured as a rectangle, it is similar in shape but 20% larger than Central Park in New York, to which it is often compared. It is over three miles long east to west, and about half a...
in San Francisco, but with Grace Slick
Grace Slick
Grace Slick is an American singer and songwriter, who was one of the lead singers of the rock groups The Great Society, Jefferson Airplane, Jefferson Starship, and Starship, and was a solo artist, for nearly three decades, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s...
singing lead and Kantner doing the backing vocal. Kaukonen would begin singing the lead two days later in Kansas City, and subsequently kept that role. The 2004 CD reissue of Volunteers included a live rendition of "Good Shepherd" as one of five live bonus tracks recorded November 28 and 29, 1969, at the Fillmore East
Fillmore East
The Fillmore East was rock promoter Bill Graham's rock venue on Second Avenue near East 6th Street in the East Village neighborhood of the Manhattan borough of New York City. It was open from 1968 to 1971, and featured some of the biggest acts in rock music at the time...
in New York
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
. This performance arrangement had no acoustic guitar part, but instead featured Kantner on electric guitar setting out a repeating but flexible pattern for the song, which Kaukonen then played against with his fills
Fill (music)
In popular music, a fill is a short musical passage, riff, or rhythmic sound which helps to sustain the listener's attention during a break between the phrases of a melody....
and solos. The song was last played during the original Airplane era in 1972.
"Good Shepherd" was part of the set list
Set list
A set list, or setlist, is a document that lists the songs that a band or musical artist intends to play, or has played, during a specific concert performance...
of the Airplane's 1989 reunion tour. It was included on the 1987/1990 Airplane compilation 2400 Fulton Street.
As Kaukonen and Airplane bassist Jack Casady
Jack Casady
Jack Casady , is an American musician considered one of the foremost bass guitarists of the rock music era and best known as a member of Jefferson Airplane. First playing as a lead guitarist with the Washington D.C...
focused on the offshoot group Hot Tuna
Hot Tuna
Hot Tuna is an American blues-rock band formed by bassist Jack Casady and guitarist Jorma Kaukonen as a spin-off of Jefferson Airplane. It plays acoustic and electric versions of original and traditional blues songs.- Jefferson Airplane side project :...
beginning in the early 1970s, "Good Shepherd" became a regular entry in their performance repertoire. One such performance was included on their 2000 DVD Acoustic Blues Live at Sweetwater. Hot Tuna performances of the song would occasionally draw old Airplane members to join in. By 2004, it was often used as a vehicle for a solo bass excursion by Casady.
Besides Hot Tuna, renditions of "Good Shepherd" also appeared on Kaukonen's 1985 live album Magic
Magic (Jorma Kaukonen album)
Magic is a live Jorma Kaukonen album containing performances of acoustic songs from Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna albums recorded during his solo tour of 1984. After a brief reunion tour in 1983 with Hot Tuna, Jorma had continued to play solo and eventually landed a contract with Relix Records...
(and the 1995 expanded release Magic Two
Magic Two
Magic Two is an expanded re-release of the live Jorma Kaukonen album, Magic, containing performances of acoustic songs recorded during his solo tour of 1984...
), which contained selections from his solo acoustic performances; as one of Kaukonen's efforts on the 1999 Phil Lesh and Friends
Phil Lesh and Friends
Phil Lesh and Friends is an American rock band formed and led by Phil Lesh, former bassist of the Grateful Dead.Phil & Friends is not a traditional group in that several different lineups of musicians have played under the name, including groups featuring members of Phish, Little Feat, and the Zen...
live album Love Will See You Through
Love Will See You Through
Love Will See You Through is the first album by the rock group Phil Lesh and Friends. It is also known as Highlights Volume One. It was recorded live in 1999 and released later that year....
; and on the 2001 Jorma Kaukonen Trio Live
Jorma Kaukonen Trio Live
Jorma Kaukonen Trio Live is a live album taken from performances from Jorma Kaukonen's 1999 solo tour, and his last album for Relix Records. Performing with Kaukonen were Michael Falzarano and Pete Sears who had both been present on his previous solo album, Too Many Years, and had performed with...
album.
In the first decade of the 21st century, the song continued to draw commentary from listeners. And Kaukonen continued to find meaning in performing "Good Shepherd" and other songs like it that celebrated religion in one context or another without preaching. He said this material gave him a doorway into scripture: "I guess you could say I loved the Bible without even knowing it. The spiritual message is always uplifting – it's a good thing."