"Stealin'"
#532 / Flood Time Capsule: 2002
The Grateful Dead was not quite a year old in the summer of 1966 when that hippy-luscious jam band from San Francisco released its very first single. The tune they recorded that June on the little Scorpio label was a jug band standard called “Stealin’.”
Their choosing that song affirms the counterculture icon’’ deep roots in all things hokum. In fact, founding members Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir and Ron “Pig Pen” McKernan all spent their pre-Dead days in a jug band called Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions, playing tunes like “Boodle Am Shake” and “Crazy Words, Crazy Tune,” later be made famous by folk revival juggers like Jim Kweskin and the guys in the Even Dozen Jug Band.
Roots
“Stealin’” as The Dead’s first 45 introduced a whole new generation to works of 1920s, that is, to the tunes of the hippies’ hipster grandparents.
Authorship of “Stealin’” is still debated today. The song was famously recorded by Will Stade’s great Memphis Jug Band on Sept. 15, 1928.
But the song’s most iconic lines — “If you don’t believe I love you, look what a fool I’ve been / If you don’t believe I’m sinkin’, look what a hole I’m in” — were recorded seven years earlier by New Orleans jazz musician Clarence Williams (and again by Leona Williams in 1922), both of whom released it as “If You Don’t Believe I Love You, Look What a Fool I’ve Been.”
Meanwhile, Gus Cannon (of The Cannon Jug Stompers) always claimed that he wrote the opening line of “Stealin’”:
Put your arms around me like a circle ‘round the sun.
Consequently, Cannon sometimes is credited with authorship of “Stealin’.” But there are issues there too. The line does not appear in any of Cannon’s recorded songs. It does, however, appear in the unrelated folk song “I Know You Rider,” which predate Cannon’s recording career.
Floodifying It
Meanwhile, “Stealin’” stole into The Flood’s world early on, when David Peyton got a kick out of the Arlo Guthrie/Pete Seeger rendition released on their 1975 Together in Concert album.
Dave initially had band mate Roger Samples singing harmony to his lead on the song. Then when Rog and family moved away in the early 1980s, Charlie Bowen took over the harmony. Dave and Charlie were still making a duet of the number well into the new millennium.
The video below features the audio of a live performance of “Stealin’” from the band’s Oct. 25, 2002, appearance on Joe Dobbs’ “Music from the Mountains” radio show on West Virginia Public Radio. As you’ll hear, Charlie introduced the song as “featuring the dulcet tones of Mister Dave Peyton!”
(That was the same radio evening, incidentally, when Joe aired the debut of the new “Music from the Mountains” theme song that Dave and Charlie had just written for him.)
Stealin’ into the Studio
Three weeks later, when the Family Flood met up with the late George Walker to record the band’s second studio album, “Stealin’” was among the 16 tunes the guys would lay down.
And the song was continuing to evolve in the Floodisphere. Most notably, Joe by then had turned over the song’s intro to Sam St. Clair’s harmonica and Chuck Romine’s rollicking banjo, happily running along on Doug Chaffin’s rock solid bass line. Click below to give it a listen:
