As Long As Grass Grows

What As Long As Grass Grows Actually Is

It's a lyric turned song, originally recorded by Mother McCoo's Uptown Challenger in 1966, before the band reformed into the Grateful Dead. The phrase itself is an old English expression of enduring love — roughly meaning "for as long as life persists." Jerry Garcia wrote the music and sang lead on the original demo. It shows up on Grateful Dead releases and has been covered by several artists over the years, most notably Johnny Cash and June Carter. The chord progression is straightforward but not entirely conventional, which is why people sometimes second-guess their voicings. In the key of D, the main shape runs D – G – A – D, with a couple of suspended flavors that give it its wandering feel. Here's the basic breakdown: Open position shapes:

D major: xx0232
G major: 320003
A major: x02220 The trickier part is the turnaround. Garcia's version uses a Dadd9 feel moving into G, then a quick pull toward A before looping back. If you play a straight D – G – A repeat, it sounds fine but loses some of the original character. Try swapping the final D for D/F(xx0212) on the turnaround — it smooths the bass motion and makes the whole thing sound less static. I spent weeks trying to match the phrasing on the '66 demo and kept running into the same wall: my strum pattern was too even. The original has this uneven, almost folk-picking quality where the accents land on off-beats in a way that doesn't sit naturally on a flat strum. The workaround I finally settled on was treating it more like a Travis-pick pattern with a thumb alternating on the D and G strings while the fingers handle the higher notes. It took about three weeks of slow practice at 60 BPM before it started feeling natural. Now it takes me maybe ten minutes to warm up into it.

There's no single definitive chord chart floating around, which is one of the more annoying things about this tune. Most fan sites post simplified versions that miss the suspended tones and the occasional F-natural passing note in Garcia's playing. If you want accuracy, listening to the source material is non-negotiable. The studio take from the Golden Road compilations is the cleanest reference point I know of.

Common Mistakes People Make

The most frequent error is overcomplicating the progression. Beginners will throw in jazz extensions — Dmaj7, G6, Aadd9 — because they hear colors in the recording and assume those are the "correct" chords. They're not wrong to hear them, but those voicings come from guitarists adding their own flavor later in the Dead's catalog, not from the original arrangement. Stick to the basics first. Learn the song as it was played in '66 before you start decorating it. Another issue is tempo drag. The song sits comfortably around 72 to 76 BPM in the original, but live performances vary wildly. If you're learning it with a metronome, start at 60 and build up. Playing along with the record at full speed from day one usually just reinforces bad timing. I've watched people struggle with this for months when a simple metronome exercise would have fixed it in two weeks.

Where to Find Reliable Recordings

The original demo is available on the Grateful Dead box set Grateful Dead (1997) and on various archival releases. Johnny Cash's cover appears on American IV: The Man Comes Around. If you're looking for solo acoustic versions, the 1987 Dave's Picks volume featuring solo performances has a clean take that's useful for learning because there's less harmonic clutter to filter through. I should mention that no official sheet music exists for the original recording, and any paid tab service claiming to have it is guessing. The band never published arrangements for this piece. This is something you learn by ear, and that's the whole point really — it's a folk melody at its core, and folk melodies were never meant to be locked into standard notation anyway.

Why As Long As Grass Grows Matters

Beyond being a nice Sunday morning strum-along, this track is historically significant. It's one of the earliest examples of Garcia's vocal style — that fragile, almost conversational delivery that would become a defining sound of the band. The lyrics themselves, largely credited to John Dawson of the Second Coming (the band's precursor group), reflect the late-60s shift from pure folk toward something more expansive. Understanding that context changes how you approach the phrasing. You play it differently when you know it's a bridge between two traditions rather than just a pretty chord progression. There's also a practical reason to learn it well. It's one of those songs that works in almost any setting — campfire, solo practice, open mic, session work. The chord vocabulary it teaches you (basic diatonic movement with suspended color) appears constantly in folk and Americana music. Mastering it gives you a template you can apply to dozens of other tunes without thinking about it.