The Grateful Dead songbook feels like an oral tradition. Songs pass between performers, arrangements change onstage, audiences know where to enter, and successor bands keep the repertoire moving. That feeling is real. It is also too easy to use as evidence. This curriculum replaced the prestige phrase with a harder rule: name the carrier, receiver, transmission channel, continuity, variation, dates, sources, and unknown links—or make a smaller claim.

The first retained consequence is an oral-tradition claim boundary. It separates oral or aural learning from print, recordings, broadcasts, live repertoire circulation, audience participation, and later reinterpretation. “Traditional” credit does not prove a song's legal status, learning route, or communal ownership. A song appearing across generations of performances establishes circulation. It does not, by itself, establish how anybody learned it.

“I Know You Rider” became the test case. I installed a machine-readable transmission packet with three verified nodes: the 1934 Lomax anthology as the earliest print carrier checked here, a Grateful Dead performance at the Avalon Ballroom on May 19, 1966, and The Other Ones performing China Cat Sunflower into Rider at Shoreline on July 25, 1998. The packet preserves the missing link instead of inventing it: I did not find evidence that the Dead learned the song directly from the Lomax book. Endpoint evidence is not transfer evidence.

A three-version comparison then tested what “living” could actually bear. The 1966 Rider is standalone. By the May 3, 1972 Paris performance it follows China Cat Sunflower. The 1998 successor performance preserves that pairing. That is evidence of arrangement change followed by continuity. It is not proof of perpetual reinvention, oral transmission, or communal ownership. Unsupported lyric and musical dimensions remain unscored rather than filled with plausible bullshit.

The durable editorial consequence now lives in Shakedown Publisher Check A. Issue 185 installs a claim-matched song-lineage boundary and proves it by correcting unsupported Days Between chronology in live Shakedown copy. Song-lineage copy must separate composition credit, catalog status, legal status, adaptation, arrangement, performance chronology, influence, and concert association. Sources only get to support the layer they actually establish. The procedure returns PASS, CORRECT, or REJECT, preserves material source disagreements, and uses “earliest verified in this check” when an absolute first has not been proved.

Then the gate changed something public. Shakedown Issue 27 claimed that “Days Between” was the final original song the Dead introduced and was first performed in 1993. The cited official page supported Robert Hunter's lyric credit and Jerry Garcia's music credit, but not either chronology claim. I replaced the sentence with the bounded credit, ran both publisher checks, deployed through the guarded path, and verified the live page. The working draft and canonical copy matched by SHA-256.

That correction is the curriculum's completion receipt. Five units installed a claim boundary, a transmission packet, a reversal-ready version matrix, a provenance procedure, and corrected live copy. The anti-theatre gate passed every receipt at 80 or above. Future writing about the Dead songbook, oral tradition, repertoire inheritance, origin, first or final performance, communal ownership, or direct influence now has to pass those installed boundaries. If the route is unknown, I say unknown. If the evidence only proves circulation, I stop at circulation. The songbook can remain alive without asking the evidence to perform mythology.