Donna Jean Godchaux-MacKay, a singer who performed on hits such as “When a Man Loves a Woman” by Percy Sledge and helped shape the sound of the Grateful Dead in the 1970s, died on Sunday in Nashville. She was 78.
The cause of her death, in hospice care, was cancer, her publicist, Dennis McNally, said in a statement.
After more than a decade as a session musician, Ms. Godchaux-MacKay, an Alabama native, joined the Grateful Dead in the early 1970s, after the freewheeling, improvisational band from the Bay Area had firmly established itself as a group that reflected the idealism of the 1960s.
Before joining the group, Ms. Godchaux-MacKay had been an established session musician, mostly in Muscle Shoals, Ala., singing behind Elvis Presley on “In the Ghetto” and “Suspicious Minds.” In 1970, she moved to San Francisco, where many younger people were flocking to restart. As first, she was skeptical of her friends’ ravings about the Dead.
“That ragged sound?” Ms. Godchaux-MacKay recalled in a 2007 interview with The Baltimore Sun. “I didn’t think they could play. I figured, ‘These guys must be good-looking.’ So I checked the back of one of their album covers and went, ‘Nope, that’s not it.’”
But soon after arriving, she caught a performance by the Dead at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco.
“To them, music was an adventure, like something spiritual,” she told The Sun. “I’d never heard anything like that. I thought, ‘This is what I want to do.’”
She was married to a jazz pianist, Keith Godchaux, who found out that Jerry Garcia, the band’s frontman, was playing at a nightclub. The couple approached Mr. Garcia, who gave them his phone number.
“I can’t believe the chutzpah we had,” Ms. Godchaux-MacKay told The Sun. “I didn’t know people did that to him all the time. But Jerry just always had his antennas up.”
Within days, they were in the band, forging a relationship that would last the rest of the decade. Ms. Godchaux-MacKay helped shape several of the Dead’s most famous songs, including “Eyes of the World” and “Playing in the Band,” one live performance of which exceeded 46 minutes.
But the collaboration wasn’t always smooth. At times, Ms. Godchaux-MacKay struggled to fit into the group’s eclectic sound, especially while sharing vocals with other members, including Mr. Garcia, Phil Lesh and Bob Weir. She and her husband left the band in 1979 — a parting that Ms. Godchaux-MacKay described as “very mutual” in a 2011 interview with The Poughkeepsie Journal. The next year, in 1980, Mr. Godchaux died in a car accident.
Ms. Godchaux-MacKay remained active musically after leaving the Dead. She married David MacKay, a bassist, in 1981, with whom she started the Donna Jean Godchaux Band. He survives her, as do her sons Kinsman MacKay and Zion Godchaux; a sister, Gogi Clark, and a brother, Ivan Thatcher.
Donna Jean Thatcher was born on Aug. 22, 1947, in Florence, Ala., to Chet Thatcher, a flight instructor, and Jamie Jeffreys, a computer skills teacher.
In 1994, Ms. Godchaux-MacKay was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Dead. Later, she appeared periodically onstage with some of her former bandmates, including with Dead & Company, the offshoot of the band, in 2016.
“I was flying to San Francisco to do a show with Phil and listening to ‘Ripple’ through my headset, when I just started sobbing. The music still touched me deeply,” Ms. Godchaux-MacKay told The Edmonton Journal in 2008, referring to Mr. Lesh.
Ms. Godchaux-MacKay also appeared with or started other groups, including Donna Jean and the Tricksters, which was a spinoff of the Zen Tricksters, a Long Island-based Grateful Dead tribute band.
While many of her best-known contributions were to the discography of the Dead, Ms. Godchaux-MacKay’s work in the studio left an indelible mark on the music of a other hitmakers, including Dionne Warwick, Cher, Neil Diamond, Ben E. King and Boz Scaggs.
“When I was 12, I started hanging out at the studios,” she told The Poughkeepsie Journal. “I just knew that’s what I was going to do. I was going to sing, come hell or high water.”
Sopan Deb is a Times reporter covering breaking news and culture.
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