An American musician, songwriter, artist and lead guitarist and vocalist of the Grateful Dead.

One of the original founders of the Grateful Dead, Garcia performed with the band for its entire 3-decade career (from 1965 to 1995). He also founded and participated in a variety of side projects, including the Jerry Garcia Band, Old and In the Way, the Garcia/Grisman acoustic duo and Legion of Mary. Garcia co-founded the New Riders of the Purple Sage with John Dawson and David Nelson. He also released several solo albums and contributed to a number of albums by other artists over the years as a session musician.

Garcia's ancestry was Galician (Spanish), Irish and Swedish. He was born in San Francisco, California, on August 1, 1942, to Jose Ramon 'Joe' Garcia and Ruth Marie 'Bobbie' (née Clifford) and was named after the composer Jerome Kern. His elder brother, Clifford Ramon 'Tiff' Garcia, was born in 1937.

Garcia was influenced by music from an early age, taking piano lessons for much of his childhood. His father was a retired professional musician and his mother enjoyed playing the piano.

At the age of 4, Garcia lost two-thirds of his right middle finger as a result of an accident while chopping wood while on vacation in the Santa Cruz Mountains. He also had several other traumatic or tragic events during his youth. When he was 5, his father drowned while fly-fishing on another vacation. Following the accident, Garcia's mother took over their late father's bar, buying out his partner for full ownership. As a result, Garcia and his brother were sent to live with their maternal grandparents, Tillie and William Clifford, just down the road.

During the 5-year period in which he lived with his grandparents, Garcia enjoyed a large amount of autonomy. While at elementary school, his artistic abilities were greatly encouraged by his third grade teacher. Also at this time, according to Garcia, he was exposed to country music and bluegrass by his grandmother, who he recalled enjoyed listening to the Grand Ole Opry. It was at this point that Garcia started playing the banjo, his first stringed instrument.

In 1953, Garcia's mother remarried to a man named Wally Matusiewicz. Subsequently, Garcia and his brother moved back home with their mother and new stepfather. However, due to the roughneck reputation of their neighbourhood at the time, Garcia's mother moved the family to Menlo Park. The same year, Garcia was also introduced to rock and roll and rhythm and blues by his brother and enjoyed listening to the likes of Ray Charles, John Lee Hooker, B. B. King, Hank Ballard and, in a few years, Chuck Berry. Clifford often memorised the vocals for his favourite songs, and would then make Garcia learn the harmony parts, a move to which Garcia later attributed much of his early ear training.

In June 1957, Garcia graduated from the local Menlo Oaks school and moved with his family back to San Francisco, where they lived in an apartment above the bar. Two months later, on Garcia's 15th birthday, his mother bought him an accordion, greatly to his disappointment. His one wish at this point was to have an electric guitar and he persuaded his mother to exchange the accordion at a local pawnshop for a Danelectro with a small amplifier.

After a short spell at Denman Junior High School, Garcia attended 10th grade at Balboa High School in 1958, where he often got into trouble for skipping classes and fighting. Consequently, in 1959, Garcia's mother again moved the family in order to get Garcia to stay out of trouble, this time to Cazadero, a small town some distance outside San Francisco, which did not please him. He did, however, join a band at his school known as the Chords. After performing and winning a contest, the band's reward was recording a song - they chose Raunchy by Bill Doggett.

After stealing his mother's car in 1960, Garcia was made to join the United States Army, where he frequently missed roll call and went AWOL.

After his discharge in 1961, Garcia drove down to East Palo Alto in a beat-up old Chevrolet to see Laird Grant, an old friend from middle school. He then spent the next few weeks sleeping where friends would allow, eventually using his car as an apartment. Through Grant, Garcia met Dave McQueen in February, who, after hearing Garcia perform some blues, introduced him to many people in the local area, including the people at the Chateau, a rooming house near Stanford University which was then a popular hangout.

Around this time, was involved in a car accident in which he sustained a broken collarbone and another acquaintance, Paul Speegle, was killed. This served as a wake-up call for Garcia and he began to realise that he needed to begin playing the guitar in earnest - a move which meant giving up his love of drawing and painting.

In April 1960, Garcia met Robert Hunter, who went on to become a long-time lyrical collaborator. Living out of his car next to Hunter in a lot behind 710 Ashbury, the two began to participate in the local art and musical scene, sometimes playing at Kepler's Books. Garcia performed his first concert with Hunter, each earning 5 dollars. The two also played in a band named the Wildwood Boys, with David Nelson.

In 1962, Garcia met Phil Lesh during a party in Palo Alto's bohemian Perry Lane neighbourhood (where Ken Kesey lived). While attending another party at 710 Ashbury, Lesh suggested to Garcia that they record some songs, with the intention of getting them played on the radio station KPFA. Using an old Wollensak tape recorder, they recorded Matty Groves and The Long Black Veil, among several other tunes. Their efforts were not in vain, later landing a spot on the show, where a 90-minute special was done specifically on Garcia. It was broadcast under the title "'The Long Black Veil' and Other Ballads: An Evening with Jerry Garcia".

Garcia soon began playing and teaching acoustic guitar and banjo. One of Garcia's students was Bob Matthews, who later engineered many of the Grateful Dead's albums. Matthews went to high school and was friends with Bob Weir, and on New Year's Eve 1963, he introduced Weir and Garcia to each other.

Between 1962 and 1964, Garcia sang and performed mainly bluegrass, old-time and folk music. One of the bands Garcia was known to perform with was the Sleepy Hollow Hog Stompers, a bluegrass act. The group consisted of Garcia on guitar, banjo, vocals, and harmonica, Marshall Leicester on banjo, guitar and vocals, and Dick Arnold on fiddle and vocals. Soon thereafter, Garcia joined a local bluegrass and folk band called Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, which also included Ron 'Pigpen' McKernan.

Around this time, the psychedelic drug LSD was beginning to gain prominence and Garcia first began experimenting with LSD in 1964.

In 1965, Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions evolved into the Warlocks, with the addition of Lesh on bass guitar and Bill Kreutzmann on percussion. However, the band quickly learned that another group was already performing under their newly selected name, prompting another name change. After several suggestions, Garcia came up with the Grateful Dead, reportedly by finding the term at random in a dictionary (with the definition as "a dead person, or his angel, showing gratitude to someone who, as an act of charity, arranged their burial"). Although the band didn't like it at first, the name quickly spread by word of mouth and soon became their official title.

Garcia served as lead guitarist, vocalist and principal songwriter of the Grateful Dead for their entire career, composing such songs as Dark Star, Franklin's Tower and Scarlet Begonias, among many others. Hunter contributed lyrics to all but a few of Garcia's songs.

Garcia was well-known for his extended guitar improvisations (often taking solo cues from Weir), and the band was famous for never playing a song the same way twice.

Garcia and the band toured almost constantly from their formation in 1965 until Garcia's in death in 1995. Periodically, there were breaks due to exhaustion or health problems, often due to Garcia's unstable health and drug use. During their 3-decade span, the Grateful Dead played 2,314 shows.

Garcia's mature guitar-playing melded elements from the various kinds of music that had influenced him, with echoes of bluegrass and earlier roots music, Celtic fiddle jigs, early rock, contemporary blues, country and western and jazz.

In addition to the Grateful Dead, Garcia had numerous side projects, the most notable being the Jerry Garcia Band. He was involved with various acoustic projects such as Old and In the Way and other bluegrass bands, including collaborations with noted bluegrass mandolinist David Grisman (the documentary film Grateful Dawg chronicles their long-term friendship). Garcia also played pedal-steel guitar with fellow-San Francisco musicians New Riders of the Purple Sage from their initial dates in 1969 to October 1971, when increased commitments with the Dead forced him to opt out of the group.

Other groups of which Garcia was a member at one time or another include the Black Mountain Boys, Legion of Mary, Reconstruction and the Jerry Garcia Acoustic Band. Garcia was also an appreciative fan of jazz artists and improvisation: he played with jazz keyboardists Merl Saunders and Howard Wales for many years in various groups and jam sessions and appeared on Ornette Coleman's 1988 album, Virgin Beauty.

Garcia also spent a lot of time in the recording studio helping out fellow musician friends in session work, often adding guitar, vocals, pedal steel, banjo and piano and even producing. He played on over 50 studio albums with a varied range of styles, including bluegrass, rock, folk, blues, country, jazz, electronic music, gospel, funk and reggae. Artists who sought Garcia's help included the Jefferson Airplane, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, David Bromberg, Peter Rowan, Warren Zevon, Country Joe McDonald, Bruce Hornsby, Bob Dylan and many more.

Throughout the early 1970s, Garcia, Lesh, Mickey Hart and David Crosby collaborated intermittently with composer and biologist Ned Lagin on several projects in the realm of early electronica, including the album Seastones (released by the Dead on their Round Records subsidiary) and L, an unfinished dance work.

Later in life, Garcia was sometimes ill because of his unstable weight, and in 1986 went into a diabetic coma that nearly cost him his life. Although his overall health improved somewhat after that, he also struggled with heroin addiction and was residing in a drug rehabilitation facility when he died of a heart attack in August 1995.