Jerome John Garcia was born in 1942, in San Francisco's
Mission District. His father, a spanish immigrant named Jose
'Joe'
Garcia, had been a jazz clarinetist and Dixieland bandleader in the
thirties, and he named his new son after his favorite Broadway
composer, Jerome Kern. In the spring of 1948, while on a fishing
trip, Garcia saw his father swept to his death by a California river.
After his father's death, Garcia spent a few years living with
his mother's parents, in one of San Francisco's working-class
districts. His grandmother had the habit of listening to Nashville's…
