A new GoFundMe is raising money for legendary Grateful Dead audio engineer and producer Betty Cantor-Jackson. Cantor-Jackson was the woman behind the coveted “Betty Boards” that became the gold standard for soundboard recordings from the Dead’s formative years from the late ’60s into the early 1980s, including the lauded May 8th, 1977, concert at Cornell University’s Barton Hall.
A friend of Cantor-Jackson’s started the GoFundMe page earlier this year, noting that “Betty is in relatively good spirits, but external forces (e.g. current flooding in and round her home and resulting loss of power) are directly threatening her happiness and sanctuary.” The fundraiser does not go into greater detail about the specific hardships Cantor-Jackson, 76, faces, but states “I know how much a financial boost will help to give Betty peace, and I therefore thank you in advance for anything you can do to help, and to help Betty see that through the strength of family, the lyric All Good Things In All Good Time is nothing but true.” As of publication, the fundraiser has generated over $12,000 of its $28,000 goal.
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This is not the first time the celebrated audio engineer has faced financial difficulties. After parting ways with the Dead in the mid-’80s, her home was foreclosed on and the contents were put in a storage unit, which ultimately went up for auction due to lack of payment. Among the contents were over 1,000 reel-to-reel tapes of live concert recordings from the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia Band, Legion of Mary, New Riders of the Purple Sage, and others.
According to Dean Budnick‘s exhaustive 2014 investigation in Relix, the Grateful Dead weren’t interested in the lot when it went up in 1986, so three parties who bid on the auction (none of them Deadheads at the time) ended up in possession of the tapes. One of the parties—fans of progressive rock, but not the Dead specifically—recognized the recordings’ value to fans and put the tapes into circulation, resulting in the sought-after “Betty Boards” that appeared in the mid-1980s and made high-quality live Dead recordings widely accessible to longtime fans and newcomers alike.
Many of the other hundreds of reels ended up finding their way to the Dead decades later, after the death of Jerry Garcia made the group into a prolific archival act. A major link in the chain of possession was Dark Star Orchestra guitarist Rob Eaton, who rescued many reels from a decaying barn and painstakingly restored them, hoping that the Dead would release them officially.
In early 2017, the Grateful Dead announced the “Betty Boards” had officially entered the band’s extensive vaults, and a few months later, the group used her recordings for an official release of Cornell 5/8/77, perhaps the most celebrated and mythologized concert in the band’s history. The album peaked at 25 on the Billboard 200. When asked in a 2020 Reddit AMA if she was paid fairly for her work that has since become canon and reissued in lavish and costly box sets, Cantor-Jackson wrote, “I got paid for the early albums. My compensation at this point is knowing people hear my work and like it.”
Consider donating to the GoFundMe for Grateful Dead audio engineer and producer Betty Cantor-Jackson here.
Mime Talk! Featuring Betty Cantor-Jackson