Jerry Garcia and The Grateful Dead Jerome John Garcia was born in 1942, in San Francisco's Mission District. His father, a spanish immigrant named Jose "Joe" Garcia, had been a jazz clarinetist and Dixieland bandleader in the thirties, and he named his new son after his favorite Broadway composer, Jerome Kern. In the spring of 1948, while on a fishing trip, Garcia saw his father swept to his death by a California river. After his father's death, Garcia spent a few years living with his mother's parents, in one of San Francisco's working-class districts. His grandmother had the habit of listening to Nashville's Grand Ol