“I don’t like to talk about it because the memories I have of being in that band are the best of my life,” says Donna Jean Godchaux-Mackay, 60, on a rare visit to Marin County since moving back to her native Alabama 27 years ago. Her trademark long hair is gray, but her face is remarkably unlined. She smiles easily and her eyes dance with the light. “I’ve never been happier,” she says. She looks at it.

Now back in music, Godchaux-Mackay linked up with a former Grateful Dead tribute band called the Zen Tricksters and is touring and recording her original songs with the band. Her husband and both her grown sons are also musicians and they all live together on 4 acres in rural Alabama with a recording studio and a grandchild on the way.

She sat in the sunshine looking over the Mill Valley village square outside the Depot Bookstore one recent morning back on her old home turf in Marin. She was staying in Petaluma with her brother, who works as plant manager at Skywalker Ranch. She was most anxious to discuss her new musical collaboration with the Tricksters, who call her Deeje, short for D.J., Donna Jean.

“I love this CD,” she says about her new record, “Donna Jean and the Tricksters.” “I love this band.”Godchaux-Mackay dropped out of music entirely after she left the Dead and only made her first, tentative steps back into the field after her children were grown. “I was very inspired,” she says. “I started writing again. It was time.”

She first met the Tricksters at a New York concert on the 10th anniversary of the death of Jerry Garcia. “I was really impressed with their musicality,” she says, “and also what great people they were.”She was also pleased to note the band had moved beyond being merely a Grateful Dead cover act and the band’s songwriters developed some strong original material of their own. “By the end of that event,” she says, “we were talking about hooking up and playing a few gigs.”

Donna Jean Thatcher was raised in the Tennessee River valley at Muscle Shoals, Ala., a small, remote town that grew into a center for recording Southern soul. In her teens, she was singing background vocals on albums recorded at local studios by out-of-towners looking for that authentic soul sound such as Boz Scaggs or Cher. She was also the high school’s head cheerleader and her boyfriend was the halfback. She sometimes had both cheerleader practice and recording sessions scheduled on Saturdays and would have to show up at the studio in her cheerleader outfit.

“Where I went to high school, girls graduated and got married in June,” she says.By the time she finished high school, Muscle Shoals had developed into quite the scene. The Rolling Stones cut “Brown Sugar” there and Paul Simon came down to record. But the young singer had her eyes on California. “I was done,” she says. “I wanted a new adventure in my life.”

Working in a clerical job with Union Oil, she found herself surrounded by Deadheads. “They made me go to a Grateful Dead concert,” she says. “That blew my little pea brain.”

In the meantime, in a matter of weeks, she met, fell in love with and married a shy young man from Concord named Keith Godchaux. They had already fallen in love before each discovered the other was a musician. Godchaux was a gifted pianist, classically trained, who played in a jazz trio. They got the idea that he should play in the Grateful Dead.

They sought out Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia at one of his solo dates at a North Beach nightclub and she told him they had something important to speak with him about. When a timid Keith Godchaux couldn’t bring himself to go backstage despite Garcia’s invitation, Garcia came out and sat at their table.

“Keith is your next piano player and I need your home phone number,” his wife told Garcia.

What the Godchauxes didn’t know is that the Dead was about to start looking for a new keyboard player, as the health of Ron “Pigpen” McKernan continued to deteriorate. Garcia brought Godchaux over to the band’s Front Street studio in San Rafael for a jam session and, within a couple of days, he was in the band. His wife joined the lineup a few months later, at a New Year’s Eve show at the Academy of Music in New York, the first time she ever sang in public.

“Hunter and Garcia were so prolific with their songs,” she says. “I remember them coming into the rehearsal hall with ‘Scarlet Begonias.’ So many of the Grateful Dead standards come from that time.”

Over the course of the ensuing years, the Godchauxes would weave themselves into the fabric of the Dead’s music. The crew built a special road case for her baby’s rocking chair.

“They treated me like a queen,” says Godchaux-Mackay, who played with the band for 81/2 months of her pregnancy with her first son, Zion, singing in front of the gigantic “Wall of Sound” sound system.

“He had all that music going through him all during gestation,” she says. “No wonder he’s a musician – it’s in his bones.”

The part she would rather not talk about – the part where she and her husband descended into a spiral of drugs and fighting, the part where she was considered to be the queen of hotel room destruction – that was what led to her and her husband leaving the band.

At the height of their involvement in the Dead scene, the Godchauxes played with the Dead, the Jerry Garcia Band and led a Keith and Donna band. “Add the extracurricular, recreational drugs that were going around,” she says. When the band showed up for a meeting at their house, they already realized the end had come.

“Keith and I knew that we needed to get out of it,” she says. “How do you get out of the Grateful Dead? I had a 4-year-old son. We were both really exhausted. It wasn’t like we quit or were fired. It was both.”

The couple started the Heart of Gold Band, but within a year, Keith Godchaux was dead after the car he was riding in rear-ended a truck in a remote area of Marin County. He was 32. Donna Jean, remarried to David Mackay, bassist in Heart of Gold, and pregnant with his baby, retreated to Alabama and raised her sons. “I decided I was going to be a mother and hang out,” she says.

Her husband continued to work as a musician and, about 15 years ago, she began singing again. “I started feeling like I could get back into music,” she says.

She started the short-lived Donna Jean Band with her husband, her oldest son and some friends about 10 years ago. Four years ago, she briefly reformed the Heart of Gold Band with both her sons and husband. She arrived at the 2005 Gathering of the Vibes, where she first met the Tricksters, booked to sing with a number of the bands at the event. A few months later, appearing in New York at a benefit for the Dead’s philanthropic arm, the Rex Foundation, she galvanized her collaboration with guitarist Jeff Mattson and the rest of the Tricksters.

“I’m more at liberty in my songwriting and my singing now than I’ve ever been,” she says. “I’m not trying to prove anything. I’m very comfortable in my own skin.