Lyrics: Robert Hunter
Music: Jerry Garcia

Reprinted with permissions: copyright Ice Nine Publishing

track 6 on Blues For Allah by the Grateful Dead

Also refered to on at least one occasion by Phil Lesh as Demented Phalanges.

First live performance June 17, 1975 at the Winterland in San Francisco.


Your rain falls like crazy fingers
Peals of fragile thunder
Keeping time
Recall the days that still are to come
Some sing blue

Hang your heart on laughing willow
Stray down to the water
Deep sea of love
Beneath the sweet calm face of the sea
Swift undertow

Life may be sweeter than this, I don't know
See how it feels in the end
Maybe Lady Lullaby sing plainly for you
Soft, strong, sweet and true

Cloud hands reaching from a rainbow
Tapping at the window
Touch your hair
So swift and bright, strange fingers of light
Float in air

Who can stop what must arrive now?
Something new is waiting
To be born
Dark as the night you're still by my side
Shine inside

Gone are the days we stopped to decide
Where we should go, we just ride
Gone are the broken eyes we saw through in dreams
Gone, both dream and lie

Life may be sweeter than this, I don't know
See how it feels in the end
Maybe Lady Lullaby sing plainly for you
Soft, strong, sweet and true

Midnight on a carousel ride
Reaching for the gold ring
Down inside
Never could reach it, just slips away
But I try