Jerry Garcia Childhood Home — Excelsior District, San Francisco

Jerome John Garcia was born on August 1, 1942, and grew up at 121 Amazon Avenue in the Excelsior District of San Francisco — a working-class neighbourhood in the city's southern reaches. His father, José Garcia, was a Spanish-born musician and bar owner; his mother, Ruth, was of Swedish and Irish descent. Jerry's childhood was marked by tragedy: he witnessed his father's drowning in a fishing accident when he was five, and he lost most of his right middle finger in a wood-chopping accident with his brother. The missing finger never affected his guitar playing, which would become among the most distinctive and beloved in American music.

Garcia's San Francisco roots were inseparable from the Grateful Dead's identity. The band formed in Palo Alto in 1965 and became the house band of the Haight-Ashbury counterculture, but Garcia's sensibility — warm, exploratory, democratic, deeply steeped in American folk, bluegrass, and country — came from his working-class San Francisco upbringing and his years playing banjo and guitar in the coffeehouses and pizza parlours of the Peninsula. He was the reluctant leader of a band that refused to have a leader, and his guitar tone — crystalline, patient, endlessly searching — became the sound of San Francisco itself.

The house at 121 Amazon Avenue is a private residence in a neighbourhood that has changed relatively little since Garcia's childhood. Jerry Garcia died of a heart attack on August 9, 1995, at the Serenity Knolls rehabilitation centre in Forest Knolls, Marin County. He was 53 years old. His ashes were scattered in the Ganges River and in San Francisco Bay.