The Dead were terrifically fortunate with lyricists. Bob Weir typically worked with the late John Perry Barlow, a founder of both the Electronic Freedom Foundation and the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
Jerry Garcia's primary lyricist died Monday night (https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-49823769). I had the good fortune to see him in concert once. I leaned on the stage at the Newport in Columbus, maybe six feet away as he wandered into a mournful rendition of 'Rubin & Cherise' and leaving me (as usual) in tears by the end of it -- his version was a bit longer with a quite different second half than the way the Dead performed it, and for all of being one guy with a guitar and harmonica, better.
If Bob Dylan's work as a lyricist is worthy of a Nobel in literature, so was Hunter's (http://artsites.ucsc.edu/gdead/agdl/#songs) (and Lennon/McCartney for that matter). You could as easily bump into a reference to Homer in one verse, and an allusion to an obscure 16th century English poem in the next, and then some astonishingly original turn of phrase that just completely resets the way you look at the world, at least for a little while.
I know what I'm going to be listening to for the rest of the day.
Very sad. He left behind a lot of brilliant songs.