In 2020, Melody Walker and her friend Caitlin Doyle decided they wanted to form an all-female Grateful Dead cover band. After a few male friends expressed interest in taking part in the group, they allowed it — as long as they dressed like women.
“It’s partly a bit that went too far,” Walker said. “When the drag ban came down [in] Tennessee, that was like the moment where we realized we might have a reason to do it.”
When Tennessee passed a 2023 law banning public drag performances, the group already had their first gig booked at a dive bar in Nashville. They decided to turn the event into a benefit for a transgender aid organization and ended up raising several thousand dollars.
“We decided to do a follow-up show, and people were then asking us to come to their cities and their states to play,” Walker said. “And so we started figuring out how we could make it a touring act, and that’s kind of where we are now.”
The band is named Bertha, stylized in all capitals as BERTHA, after the Grateful Dead song of the same title. Each band member also decided to take Bertha as their drag name, giving each other cheeky familial titles like “Mommy Bertha” (Doyle), “Daddy Bertha” (Walker) and “Auntie Bertha” (Thomas Bryan Eaton, the band’s lead guitarist).
BERTHA was one of several acts that performed at the 2025 ELLNORA festival, a biennial guitar festival hosted by the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts in Urbana. The three-day event kicked off Krannert’s 2025-2026 season with a genre-diverse array of musicians, featuring rock, blues, jazz and classical performances.
Doyle said that while audiences may not expect to see drag queens performing Grateful Dead songs, she hopes they can normalize the art form.
“I think that’s why people gravitated towards it and liked it, like from the very beginning,” she said. “Because it just filled this hole in the music industry.”
BERTHA’s act is more than just entertainment. Since their first show in Nashville, philanthropy has become a major part of their mission. Every ticketed performance is a benefit for an organization in the city they are in, and they partner with local drag performers to host their shows.
“We get to build community wherever we go,” said Walker. “And we’ve learned so many drag tips, too, from our hosts. We’ve been pretty busted on our drag, and we’ve learned some hot tips.”
The impact of Tennessee’s drag ban and other laws like it is a “chilling effect,” according to Walker. A district court ruled to block the law from taking effect in 2023, but a 2024 federal appeals court ruling reinstated restrictions on drag, according to WPLN.
Earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to take up a legal challenge to the law.
Walker said that while she hasn’t seen drag performers arrested, acts like BERTHA and venues that regularly host drag performers are afraid of being targeted by the government or vigilante groups that may be empowered by the law.
None of BERTHA’s members are trans, but Doyle said she experiences the uneasiness people feel around drag when they aren’t familiar with it, despite the fact that she is a cisgender woman performing in feminine drag.
“You don’t have a problem with Dolly Parton having her bosom out and her long nails and her wig and her makeup and her lashes,” she said. “Why would you have a problem with me doing the same exact thing?”
Walker said BERTHA will continue to fight negative narratives surrounding their art.
“There’s a lot of slander out there right now as far as drag artists and trans folks, and I really hope that we can just sort of turn the temperature down on that for people who maybe just didn’t know anyone before,” she said. “Now they know seven Grateful Drag artists, you know, and we’ll be their friend.”