Donna Jean Godchaux-MacKay, who lent her powerful, soaring, Gospel-style voice to the Grateful Dead as a backup singer from 1971 to 1979, has died, her representative confirmed to TheWrap on Monday. She was 78.
Godchaux died Sunday, Nov. 2, at a Nashville hospice after a long battle with cancer, longtime Grateful Dead publicist and historian Dennis McNally shared in a statement. She was surrounded by loving family.
“She was a sweet and warmly beautiful spirit, and all those who knew her are united in loss,” the statement said. “In the words of Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, ‘May the four winds blow her safely home.’”
Donna Godchaux and husband Keith Godchaux, a keyboardist, joined the band in 1971 sometime after the death of Ron “Pigpen” McKernan. She introduced her husband to Jerry Garcia after the lead guitarist’s performance at San Francisco’s Keystone Korner and, according to band lore, presented him as the Grateful Dead’s new keyboardist. He got the job, and she joined the band shortly afterwards, becoming their only full-time backup singer.
For the next eight years – known to “Heads” as “The Godchaux Era” – Keith Godchaux provided the band’s jazziest-yet melodic backdrops, mostly on piano, while Donna Godchaux’s soaring voice and trademark wails on songs like “Playin’ in the Band” and “The Music Never Stopped” were cemented firmly in the band without description’s vast canon.
The couple left the band in 1979, citing creative differences, though it was partly financial, too; the Dead’s massive touring carnival and decadent, state-of-the-art sound systems made it hard to sustain profitability.
After Keith Godchaux died in 1980, she married David MacKay, a bassist with whom she formed solo projects, and the couple moved to her childhood home in Alabama to lead a quiet, private life. Though no longer a member of the Grateful Dead, Donna Godchaux-MacKay remained very much in their orbit, even after Garcia’s death in 1995 – with projects like Kettle Joe’s Psychedelic Swamp Revue and making guest appearances with Bob Weir & Rat Dog and Dead & Company.
She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994 as a member of the Grateful Dead – one of only eleven musicians who were at one time or another considered fulltime players. With Godchaux’s death, only four of those remain alive: Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzmann, Mickey Hart and Tom Constanten.
She is survived by her husband MacKay; her son Kinsman MacKay and his wife Molly; her son Zion Godchaux and his son Delta; sister Gogi Clark and brother Ivan Thatcher.
