OWENSBORO, KY.- Just off the lobby of the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame & Museum is the “picking room” — a cozy, glass-enclosed corner where visitors are encouraged to grab any of the guitars, banjos and fiddles hanging on the wood-paneled walls and play. Located on the Ohio River 35 miles northwest of Rosine, the small farming community that produced bluegrass pioneer Bill Monroe, the museum’s readily available instruments and neighborly spirit are no surprise.

What is unexpected? The 1961 Chevy Corvair sticking out of a wall upstairs in the museum’s main hall and the newly unveiled exhibit it anchors: an in-depth look at Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia’s long and often intense love affair with bluegrass music.

Best known as the standard-bearer for San Francisco’s psychedelic sound and the house band for Ken Kesey’s storied Acid Tests, Grateful Dead concerts were not a big draw in the beating red heart of bluegrass country. Of the more than 3,500 shows Garcia played with the Dead and his other bands, only seven were in Kentucky. But the subsequent emergence of the “jamgrass” scene — a bluegrass cousin to the bands who take a cue from the Dead in emphasizing extended improvisations — is one of the ways that time and a widening appreciation have proved the Dead to be one of the most American of bands. It’s also given Garcia a new kind of cultural heft and near-mythological status, 28 years after his death.

Musicians and listeners alike have long singled out “Old & in the Way,” a 1975 LP from one of Garcia’s side projects, as the gateway recording that introduced them to bluegrass. But much of “Jerry Garcia — A Bluegrass Journey,” the imaginative and carefully curated show that recently began a two-year run at the museum, is built around an intriguing and less well-known event in Garcia’s career: Before forming the Grateful Dead, he aspired to a career as a bluegrass musician and undertook a 1964 cross-country musical pilgrimage, largely in the hope of landing a job as Monroe’s banjo player.

“I’ve been with the museum for 13 years and an exhibit on Jerry Garcia has always been on the back burner,” said its curator, Carly Smith. Those discussions were pushed to the forefront when the museum moved in 2018 to a new 64,000-square-foot home that enhanced its ability to present detailed exhibits and includes superb indoor and outdoor performance spaces. Though the pandemic necessitated a two-year delay, the show is an ambitious bid to highlight a little-known connection and build bridges between genres and audiences. Mounted with the cooperation of Garcia’s family, it includes a dozen of his instruments, numerous clippings, artifacts and mementos and a well-researched narrative of Garcia’s formative years on the Bay Area’s folk scene.

“The Grateful Dead were certainly an experiment in community,” said guitarist Vince Herman, a founder of the jamgrass group Leftover Salmon and an early and eager advocate of the exhibit. “They really formed a culture and bluegrass does the same. Just like the Deadheads, you meet folks at bluegrass shows and festivals that become lifelong friends. To me, this is like two distinct families blending.” Some of that blending will be on display next month during Romp, the museum’s annual bluegrass and country outdoor festival, which will include several Garcia- and Grateful Dead-inspired jamgrass bands.

The son of a professional musician who named him for the composer Jerome Kern, Garcia had his first brush with country-style guitar players in 1960 during a brief stretch in the army. He soon became captivated by the traditional ballads, string bands and mountain music that formed the canon of the 1960s folk revival.

As a young beatnik and hustling professional musician in Palo Alto, California, Garcia began playing in local coffeehouses and hangouts, performing on guitar and banjo in a variety of groups including the Hart Valley Drifters and the Sleepy Hollow Hog Stompers, as well as in a duo with his then-wife, Sara Katz.

“At one point the Rooftop Singers had a hit with ‘Walk Right In’ and we thought, well, gosh, we’re a lot better than that — we could make a hit,” Katz recalled in a phone interview. “I was mildly talented and enjoyed it, but the music was everything to him,” she added. “Jerry was a perfectionist and bent on being good and my musicianship and drive were nowhere in the same league. I joined him in knowing that he was destined for greatness, but we just didn’t know how it was going to happen. It took some unexpected turns along the way.”

Bluegrass would prove one of them. A folk purist initially dismissive of Bob Dylan, Garcia found himself increasingly drawn to the challenge of bluegrass, which demands a high level of technical proficiency and places a premium on musical acumen, sensitivity and wit. A demon for practice, he set about learning by ear, slowing down records to figure out what players such as Earl Scruggs, Bill Keith and Billy Ray Latham of the Kentucky Colonels were doing.

Living hand-to-mouth and with a baby on the way, the couple nonetheless placed all their bets on Garcia’s making it as a banjo player, returning as many wedding gifts as they could for cash and selling other instruments to buy him a first-rate 1930s Weyman banjo. Guitarist Sandy Rothman, Garcia’s bandmate in the bluegrass group Black Mountain Boys, had regaled him with tales of a trip he’d made back East to hear and play bluegrass the previous year, and the two agreed to do it again — partly to hear, play and record music — but also with the aim of auditioning for Monroe, whom Garcia had met briefly at the Ash Grove, a Los Angeles club.

Four months after the birth of Garcia’s daughter Heather, he and Rothman packed a small, white Corvair with their instruments, clothes, a reel-to-reel tape recorder and as many blank tapes as they could afford. On the first leg of the trip they caravaned with the Kentucky Colonels, a Los Angeles bluegrass band that featured guitarist Clarence White, who, like Garcia, would later cross over to rock as the lead guitarist of the Byrds. “Any time Jerry wasn’t holding the wheel, he was probably playing his banjo,” Rothman recalled.

After a swing through the Deep South, they turned north, heading to Monroe’s Brown County Jamboree in Bean Blossom, Indiana. Reintroducing themselves to the bandleader, Garcia just couldn’t pull the trigger and ask for an audition, later saying he’d been “too chicken.” Instead, they continued east, and a parking-lot jam with New York mandolinist David Grisman in Pennsylvania proved to be the beginning of a lifelong friendship. Five years later, Grisman’s mandolin would animate one of the Grateful Dead’s best-known recordings, “Friend of the Devil,” and they would continue to collaborate from time to time for the rest of Garcia’s life, most notably with “Old & in the Way.”

They split up in Bloomington, where Rothman stayed on for the summer and eventually did land a gig with Monroe, while Garcia drove back to Palo Alto. Noting that their trip was Garcia’s first beyond the West Coast, Rothman wondered if Garcia’s inability to ask for an audition wasn’t so much a lack of nerve as a deeper discomfort. “He just turned pale when he saw whites-only drinking fountains,” Rothman, who had been horrified at the sight of them the year before, said, “and I think that helped to seal the deal on him saying ‘this is not my culture.’”

Katz said there was a feeling of failure for Garcia, “because he had set off wanting to play with Bill Monroe and realized that just wasn’t going to happen and that he had to get home. Partly to get back to us, but mainly to figure out what came next.”

An answer appeared when a Boston-based group, the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, performed in nearby Berkeley. A brief blip on the folk revival scene, jug bands played loose, rollicking versions of Depression-era tunes, often focusing on old novelty records and bawdy blues. Katz remembered going with Garcia to hear Kweskin every night. “They were just so delightful and fun and kind of crazy,” she said. “I think Jerry needed a release and this was just perfect.”

In short order, Garcia and several friends including Ron McKernan, known as Pigpen, and Bob Weir formed Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions, an acoustic band that later went electric, changing their name first to the Warlocks and later to the Grateful Dead.

And then?

“And then,” Katz said, “came LSD.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.