On this day in history, August 1, 1942, Jerry Garcia was born in San Francisco, master of American songcraft

Jerry Garcia's birthday is August 1. He was born in San Francisco in 1942 and proved a master of American musical styles, most notably with The Grateful Dead.

Garcia's distinctive high notes give the song "Teach Your Children" its sunny, folk-country appeal.  Kerry J. Byrne is a lifestyle reporter with Fox News Digital.

The band defied music-industry convention that demanded clipped three-minute records for airplay and retail sales. 

"The Grateful Dead did not play in sets; no eight numbers to a set, then a twenty-five-minute break, and so on, four or five sets and then the close-out," Tom Wolfe wrote in "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," his seminal 1968 literary nonfiction book that captured the hallucinogenic haze of California counterculture.