As I was walkin’ ’round Grosvenor Square1,2
not a chill to the winter
but a nip to the air
from the other direction
she was calling my eye
It could be an illusion
but I might as well try
Might as well try
She had rings on her fingers and
bells on her shoes3
And I knew without asking she was
into the blues
She wore scarlet begonias
tucked into her curls
I knew right away
she was not like other girls—
other girls
In the thick of the evening
when the dealing got rough
she was too pat to open and
too cool to bluff4
As I picked up my matches and
was closing the door
I had one of those flashes:
I’d been there before—
been there before
I ain’t often right5
but I’ve never been wrong
It seldom turns out the way
it does in the song
Once in a while
you get shown the light
in the strangest of places
if you look at it right
Well there ain’t nothing wrong
with the way she moves
Or scarlet begonias or a
touch of the blues
And there’s nothing wrong with
the love that’s in her eye6
I had to learn the hard way
to let her pass by—
let her pass by
The wind in the willows played tea for two7,8
The sky was yellow and the sun was blue
Strangers stopping strangers
just to shake their hand
Everybody’s playing
in the Heart of Gold Band
Heart of Gold Band
Words by Robert Hunter
Music by Jerry Garcia
A standard opening line in the British tradition, used in ballads and nursery rhymes. Along with the reference to Grosvenor Square, this line sets the song squarely in Britain.
One nursery rhyme that the song clearly echoes is “Pippen Hill”:
As I was going up Pippen Hill,
Pippen Hill was dirty;
There I met a pretty Miss,
And she dropped me a curtsy.
A square in London, built in 1932 and named for Sir Richard Grosvenor. The American embassy is located there.
This line echoes another nursery rhyme, “Banbury Cross”:
Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross,
To see an old lady upon a white horse.
Rings on her fingers, and bells on her toes,
She shall have music wherever she goes.
Ray Stevens’s 1962 song “Ahab the Arab” also contains similar lines.
“Sure, I’ve got rings on my fingers and bells on my toes” also comes from the chorus to a popular Irish song “I’ve Got Rings on My Fingers” composed by R. P. Watson and F. J. Barnes. It was one of the top twenty songs of 1910.
In poker, “too pat to open” usually indicates that someone else opens, allowing the player who passed to raise the stakes from the onset. “Too cool to bluff” would seem like the hand is pat, or, all aces or the like, and therefore the player has no need to bluff.
The folk song “Number Twelve Train” contains the line “I may be wrong, but I’ll be right someday”
Garcia sang, “the look that’s in her eye.”
“Blueberry Hill,” a song by Al Lewis, Larry Stock, and Vincent Rose, first appeared when sung by Gene Autry in the 1941 movie The Singing Hills. Glenn Miller made it a hit in the same year. Louis Armstrong recorded it in 1949, and Fats Domino in 1957. The line echoed:
The children’s book by Kenneth Grahame (1859–1932), published in 1908, featuring a cast of animal characters. Frances Clarke Sayers, in a 1959 preface to the book, says:
“On the surface, it is an animal story concerned with the small creatures of field and wood and river bank. Aside from their ability to talk, and a brief interlude of mysticism in which the great god of nature makes his presence known, it is a world of reality like that of the fable. . . . It is a prose poem spoken in praise of the commonplace; a pastoral set in an English landscape which sings the grace of English life and custom. But it is something more. The tragedy inherent in all life is here, the threat of ‘evil’ and the great mysteries are touched upon.”
The title of the book comes from the beautiful chapter, dead in the book’s center, titled “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn,” in which Rat and Mole listen as the wind in the reeds and trees by the riverbank slowly transforms into pipe music:
Breathless and transfixed the Mole stopped rowing as the liquid run of that glad piping broke on him like a wave, caught him up, and possessed him utterly. He saw the tears on his comrade’s cheeks, and bowed his head and understood. . . . And the light grew steadily stronger, but no birds sang as they were wont to do at the approach of dawn; and but for the heavenly music all was marvellously still. . . . In midmost of the stream, embraced in the weir’s [!] shimmering armspread, a small island lay anchored, fringed close with willow and silver birch and alder.
A yellow sky and a blue sun would not be out of place in Grahame’s evocative writing.
The name of a song published in 1924; music by Vincent Youmans (1898–1946), words by Irving Caesar (1895–1996). From the musical comedy No, No, Nanette, which opened in Detroit in April 1924. This is one of the most familiar and catchiest melodies in the world, and has been extensively covered, especially by jazz performers.
Alec Wilder, in his American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900–1950, says:
The phenomenal hit of No, No, Nanette was, of course, “Tea for Two.” Because of the abrupt key shift in the second section from A-flat major to C major, it is very surprising to me that the song became such a success. And not only that, but after the key change and at the end of the C-major section, the song is virtually wrenched back into A-flat by means of a whole note, E-flat, and its supporting chord, E-flat-dominant seventh. Irving Caesar has said that the opening section of the lyric was never intended to be more than a “dummy” one by means of which the lyricist is able to recall later on, while writing the true lyric, how the notes and accents fall. He also says that, in order to use the words he wanted in the second section, the C-major section, he persuaded Youmans to add notes which resulted in its being similar to, but not an exact imitation of, the first section. . . . But for the rhythmic variance in the second section, the entire song is made of dotted quarter and eighth notes. This certainly ran the risk of monotony, yet the record stands: It was one of Youmans’s biggest songs and it remains a standard forty-odd years later. 64
Studio recording: Grateful Dead from the Mars Hotel (June 27, 1974).
First performance: March 23, 1974, at the Cow Palace in Daly City, California. Two days later, the group began recording From the Mars Hotel, on which the song appears. “Scarlet Begonias” remained a steady number in the repertoire thereafter.
On June 1, 2002, when Hunter opened for Phil and Friends, he introduced his wife and said he had written the song for her. And on August 4, he added a verse after the final one, beginning with “As I was walking down Grosvenor Square”:
She had two white vermilions in her snow-white hair
She must have been Mattie, but she looked like my wife
I gazed into the future, could be all right, gettin’ old with her,
Gettin’ old with her, my Scarlet Begonias