Nashville's Bertha gives the Grateful Dead an irreverent, joyful makeover.
“I was like, ‘It would still be an all-woman band if everyone was in drag,” Walker says. “It was a joke. And I was like, ‘Wait, but how hilarious and amazing would that be?’ We were cracking up at the idea of how joyful and irreverent that would be and how in the spirit of the Grateful Dead it would be.”
And thus Bertha came to be. Walker, the singer for progressive bluegrass band Front Country, and Doyle, formerly of the duo Smooth Hound Smith, recruited other musicians in their orbit including Jacob Groopman , singer-songwriter Lindsay Lou, drummer Alex Bice, guitarist Thomas Bryan Eaton, banjoist Kyle Tuttle, and fiddler Milly Raccoon to get in drag and play some Dead tunes.Dee’s
Country Cocktail Lounge in Madison to raise money for local LGBTQ+ causes. They packed the place out with a colorful performance dedicated to the Dead’s countercultural spirit and the group’s many followers over the years who are women and/or queer. “It’s honoring the fact that there have always been queer Deadheads, there have always been so many women in the scene, but maybe they haven’t been uplifted and celebrated they way they should be,” Walker says. The group’s set included the song that inspired their name along with “Brown Eyed Women,” “Loose Lucy,” “Scarlet Begonias,” “Sugar Magnolia” and several others.
Marlene Twitty-Fargo, a local drag performer who performs hilariously raunchy reworks of popular country songs in her own band, hosted the event, which has so far raised nearly $4,000 to be split between Inclusion Tennessee, Trans Aid Nashville, and Williamson County Trans Aid.
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