In 1969, Garcia, along with John Dawson and David Nelson, co-founded the country rock band the New Riders of the Purple Sage.

In 1973 Garcia co-founded the short-lived bluegrass group Old & In the Way, which also included David Grisman and John Kahn.

Garcia played banjo in that band, harking back to his pre-Grateful Dead days as a bluegrass musician.

As a result, the discography of Jerry Garcia, as a member of the Grateful Dead and as a solo musician, includes several hundred albums.

[6][7][8] Donna Jean Godchaux, who was in the Jerry Garcia Band from 1976 to 1978, later reflected, "It was very different from the Grateful Dead in that everything was so scaled back to where we could play theaters instead of hockey rinks.

It was just a really unique situation to be as popular as Jerry Garcia was and still be able to be in a band that could do what we did in a smaller setting than the Grateful Dead.

The JGAB included two musicians who had played with Garcia in 1964 in a bluegrass band called the Black Mountain Boys – Sandy Rothman and David Nelson.

In 1970 he played a number of Monday night jam sessions with Garcia at the Matrix, a small venue in San Francisco.

One of the lineups, in 1974 and 1975, was Legion of Mary, featuring Martin Fierro on saxophone and flute, John Kahn on bass, and Ron Tutt on drums.

From 1990 to 1995, Garcia and Grisman recorded dozens of studio sessions playing acoustic music – mostly folk, old time, and bluegrass songs – sometimes as a duo and sometimes with other musicians.

[36][37][38][39][40] The New Riders of the Purple Sage, a country rock band, was founded in 1969 by Jerry Garcia, John Dawson, and David Nelson.

Its best-known lineup was Jerry Garcia on banjo, Peter Rowan on guitar, David Grisman on mandolin, John Kahn on bass, and Vassar Clements on fiddle.

[46][47] Author Jeff Tamarkin wrote, "Although OAITW was able to handle a traditional bluegrass number – vocal or instrumental – as well as anyone, the musicians brought a jam band sensibility and rock attitude to the proceedings, extending the instrumental segments with improvisations, something alien to bluegrass up to that point.

By doing so, the quintet pretty much invented the concept of progressive bluegrass..."[48] In the early 1960s, after getting out of the Army, Jerry Garcia started playing folk and old-time music.

The jug band was a precursor of the Grateful Dead, as its members also included Bob Weir and Ron "Pigpen" McKernan.

On each album, each side of the record will contain selected music from a different live performance by Jerry Garcia and various other musicians.