Sleepy Hollow Hog Stompers

The Sleepy Hollow Hog Stompers were Garcia’s first real old-time string band, formed in May 1962 with Marshall Leicester and fiddler Dick Arnold. The group leaned toward pre-bluegrass Appalachian music, the fiddle tunes, ballads and banjo songs heard on Harry Smith’s Anthology and early Folkways records. Garcia and Leicester switched between banjo and guitar. Their June 11, 1962 show at the second Boar’s Head coffeehouse, then at the Peninsula Jewish Community Center in San Carlos, was taped and released on Before the Dead. It ran through “Man of Constant Sorrow,” “Shady Grove,” and “Sally Goodin.” The trio split up by the fall, but it played again in August 1963 at Coffee and Confusion in San Francisco and at Palo Alto’s Top of the Tangent.