Happy Birthday Donna Jean!

Dead Ahead

by James Hughes in the Jackson Free Press
March 26, 2008

Small-town Alabama girl, not long out of high school, journeys to the West Coast at the close of the ’60s. The Grateful Dead hired her and her newfound love. A decade later after her lover’s death, she raises their son, helps revive the band they started together, remarries, births another boy, winds up making music with the whole family—band mate husband and kids plus assorted gifted friends—and eventually makes her way home again.

Donna Jean Godchaux-McKay was already a hit singer when she left for California, having lent backup vocals to records by Aretha Franklin, Percy Sledge and others, often showing up for a recording session from cheerleading practice, still wearing her uniform.

Elvis brought her up to Memphis to sing on his 1969 comeback album. She sings on “Suspicious Minds” and “In the Ghetto,” and maybe also on “Kentucky Rain,” the sad, shimmering single from those same sessions. Is that really her echoing Elvis’s choked-up “walking through ... with the rain in my shoes?”

“I don’t remember,” Godchaux-McKay says today, laughing.

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