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Was Woodstock a folk festival?
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Subject: Was Woodstock a folk festival? From: Marion Date: 29 Jun 02 - 02:11 PM Hello all. I was talking to a middle-aged person - not particularly folkie-minded - who surprised me by referring to Woodstock as a folk festival. I'm not a Woodstock-nostalgia-head by any means, but I would have called it a rock festival, and the first musician that springs to mind when I think of Woodstock is Jimi Hendrix. My friend went on to say that folk festivals in general are heirs of Woodstock - that the concept of getting together in a park for a weekend of continuous concerts originated at Woodstock. Again, I'm no expert, but that doesn't sound right to me. Surely Bean Blossom got started before 1969? Marion |
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Subject: RE: Was Woodstock a folk festival? From: GUEST Date: 29 Jun 02 - 02:18 PM well there weren't no horses singing *grin* |
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Subject: RE: Was Woodstock a folk festival? From: musicmick Date: 29 Jun 02 - 03:07 PM There were many festivals that preceded Woodstock and Bean Blossom, too. Woodstock was an early festival of pop culture, which was mostly a crossover from the commercial "Hootenany" craze (in which, traditional music enjoyed some measure of general popularity) to "Folk Rock" (where traditional music was shelved for more salable and profitable original compositions). Woodstock was a folk event in the makeup and behavior of its audience more than the genre of its content. It might also be argued that it was a folk event in the mythical exadurations that have become part of what can best be described as suburban legend. Music festivals are old hat. Tanglewood (classical), Jacob's Pillow (ballet), Newport (jazz and folk), Chicago (folk), Philly (folk, now a mixture of folk and contemporary), Monterey (jazz) are just a few that come to mind. There are some great old bluegrass festivals that preceded Beanblossom. Union Grove,Va. and Ashville, N.C. were operating in the late fifties, but I cant supply their start up dates. Mike Miller |
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Subject: RE: Was Woodstock a folk festival? From: catspaw49 Date: 29 Jun 02 - 05:21 PM no Spaw |
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Subject: RE: Was Woodstock a folk festival? From: Art Thieme Date: 29 Jun 02 - 06:25 PM There were festivals in Galax Virginia, North Carolina, Berea Kentucky, Wieser Idaho(fiddles), Bascom Lamar Lunsford's festivals---so many more.------ Hundreds, if not thousands of festivals all over the USA and the world highlighting the local ethnic musics of specific areas have been going on for centuries before Woodstock was a glimmer in anyone's mind's eyes.
That said, Woodstock was just a huge children's music assembly. The people there, at least many of them, became teachers. (Remember the old saying about "Those that can, do---and those that can't,...")------After gaining the musical and life insights gleaned from being at that huge gathering, these pubescent multitudes, with their *****e-x-p-a-n-d-e-d***** minds, were better able to provide musical jobs for their friends who were maybe more talented than they were but, nonetheless, were unemployed except for the lousy-paying coffeehouse gigs we've all said we loved so much in so many other threads. No, as 'Spaw said, Woodstock wasn't a folk festival. But we folkies are all pretty happy and thankful that it took place. I'm not sure this favorite saying of mine fits here, but "If you rob Peter to pay Paul, you can always depend on the support of Paul ! (And probably Mary too.) Art Thieme |
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Subject: RE: Was Woodstock a folk festival? From: Art Thieme Date: 29 Jun 02 - 06:32 PM Sorry, I forgot to put one o' these somewhere in my posting. ;-) **BIG GRIN** Meant To Be Funny Laugh ((((((((((GUFFAW)))))))) Art Thieme |
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Subject: RE: Was Woodstock a folk festival? From: Peter K (Fionn) Date: 29 Jun 02 - 08:09 PM Joan Baez was there, but then so was Janis Joplin and Ten Years After. Or am I miximg up festivals? It was in a phase of my life that seems a bit blurry for some reason. |
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Subject: RE: Was Woodstock a folk festival? From: GUEST,Lyle Date: 29 Jun 02 - 09:46 PM Well, the purists ain't gonna like this, but and absolute "No it was not a folk festival" is a little strong. If you remember back then there was a GREAT "folk movement" afoot that the more traditional folk people did not regard as folk in any way, shape or form. Example: Many of the popular (at that time) trio's were considered too commercial to be called folk. But that's all been hashed over before in the Cat, so I ain't said nothin' new. BUT - a lot of people that liked the expanded notion of folk showed up at Woodstock, and to them it was folk. I don't want to take the time and bandwidth to argue this next point, but there is strong evidence to support the notion that folk music today would not be as popular as it is without the support of the non-purists. So maybe it wasn't truly folk, but it sure helped to popularize all of folk-type music. Then there's another thing: If you were there and can remember what happened, you're not enough of a true folkie to judge what it was. If you're like the rest of us, and can remember driving in and some time later being on the road home, you have experienced the true sprite of Woodstock. Lyle PS. BTW, did you know that if you type in 'folkie' and check it with spell checker, it suggests the proper spelling is 'phallic.' Now, Spaw, there's one fer you to elaborate on!! |
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Subject: RE: Was Woodstock a folk festival? From: Big Mick Date: 30 Jun 02 - 01:36 AM Lyle...........buddy............nice try.........it wasn't a folk festival...........and the old "if you remember the 60's, you weren't there" just doesn't make it so. True, there were folks that played who had a folk background, sure folk influenced much of the music..........but it was not a folk festival. All the best, Mick |
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Subject: RE: Was Woodstock a folk festival? From: Steve Latimer Date: 01 Jul 02 - 01:38 AM It might be an easy way out, but it was billed as and succeeded in being a music and arts festival. Arlo, Richie Havens, Baez, Melanie could be considered folk. It was a snapshot of how open our ears were at the time. I was at the sight a week ago for the first time in my life. Kind neat. Woodstock Trivia. What act was on the bill, but cancelled at the last minute?
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Subject: RE: Was Woodstock a folk festival? From: GUEST,Russ Date: 01 Jul 02 - 10:27 AM It was not billed as a folk festival. It was not perceived as a folk festival by the sponsors, musicians, or audience. As has been pointed out, "folk festival" was a known concept at the time. If the creators did not call it a "folk" festival, that was a conscious decision on their part. |
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Subject: RE: Was Woodstock a folk festival? From: GUEST Date: 01 Jul 02 - 11:09 AM If memory serves, the promoters called it the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival. Day 1 of the three day festival tried to be folky -- Joan Baez, Country Joe, Melanie, Bert somebody or other. |
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Subject: RE: Was Woodstock a folk festival? From: Bill D Date: 01 Jul 02 - 11:53 AM several posters have used the phrase "could be considered", which shows just how far from 'folk' it was....the fact that several performers had been associated with or occasionally used vaguely 'folkish' material hardly qualifies an event. It was pop/rock with teeny shadows of 'folk' on a few things. |
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Subject: RE: Was Woodstock a folk festival? From: GUEST,Bill Kennedy Date: 01 Jul 02 - 12:43 PM to unnecessarily add to Catspaw's brilliant and insightful response, elegant in its concise yet thoughtful summation of the facts, let me just say no way in hell! does this really need discussing? |
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Subject: RE: Was Woodstock a folk festival? From: Don Firth Date: 01 Jul 02 - 02:17 PM Marion, I'm afraid your acquaintance doesn't know from Shinola. There were folk festivals long before the Woodstock promoters and attendees were even born. The real seeds of the folk music revival were sown back in the eighteenth century, but things didn't begin to manifest all that much (at least in the U. S.) until around the time of the Federal Music Project and the founding of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress. This occurred more or less concurrently with a proliferation of folk festivals such as the events that Art Thieme mentions above. Even before the Federal Music Project, the White Top Folk Festival in Virginia started in 1930 or 31. Walt Robertson's first big fascination with folk music began while he was attending Haverford College in the late Forties. He attended a big folk festival at Swarthmore, just down the road. In attendance were Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, John Jacob Niles, Richard Dyer-Bennet, The Lomaxes, you name it, they were all there. A lot of people turned into folkies at that event. Late-comers on the festival scene include the Berkeley Folk Festival, an annual affair that started in the mid-Fifties, and Newport, which, as I recall, began in 1959. They were not as huge as Woodstock and did not get the media attention that Woodstock did, but they were big. The Berkeley festivals in particular were strongly focused on traditional music rather than the soon-to-arrive "folk/rock fusion" stuff. Woodstock—in 1969—was a mammoth rock festival, love-in, and general mud-wallow. With all due respect, an appearance by Joan Baez doth not a folk festival make. And please—horse me no horses! To get a little historical perspective, read Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music by Benjamin Filene, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill and London, 2000, 325 pages, paperback, $13.97 at Amazon (click on "Help Support Mudcat" and scroll down to the "Amazon" link). Filene starts with the early collectors, including Johann Gottfied von Herder (1744-1803), the first scholar-collector to use the word "folk song" (volkslieder), and goes from there. He gives an in-depth picture of the differing viewpoints, attitudes, and prejudices of the various scholars and collectors and how it affected the results of their work. He details the steps in the folk music revival, and he shows how it was not just the folklorists, but the promoters, the record companies, and the singers themselves who, sometimes intentionally and sometimes unwittingly, shaped and directed the whole thing. The book gives a much clearer idea of this amorphous sludge-puddle we call "folk music" and how it got that way. Very informative and full of eyebrow-raising revelations. Get it. Read it. Be amazed. Don Firth
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Subject: RE: Was Woodstock a folk festival? From: musicmick Date: 01 Jul 02 - 03:39 PM Hallelujah, Mr. Firth. Your research is accurate and your definitions deadly. I attended many folk festivals in the mid 50s including rural fests like Union Grove and Sunset Park and urban, college affiliated fests like Swarthmore, Chicago and Dickenson. I was at Newport, of course. That was considered the Cadilac event. I started performing at festivals around 1960 (I was a cute kid) and I must have appeared at over forty different ones that preceded Woodstock. The Philadelphia Folk Festival, with which I have been most often identified, started around '61 or '62. It is still in business, some forty one years later. Mike Miller |
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Subject: RE: Was Woodstock a folk festival? From: Jack the Sailor Date: 01 Jul 02 - 04:14 PM Hell no!! |
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Subject: RE: Was Woodstock a folk festival? From: GUEST,Just Amy Date: 01 Jul 02 - 04:42 PM It wasn't a folk festival then, but it is now. :) |
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Subject: RE: Was Woodstock a folk festival? From: Jerry Rasmussen Date: 01 Jul 02 - 06:05 PM Of course it wasn't a folk festival (I was there *And was not so drugged out that I can't remember it.* You can tell it wasn't a folk festival because folk singers never made that kind of money. Maybe the real definition of folk music is music you sing for love or money (usually the former.) :-) Jerry |
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Subject: RE: Was Woodstock a folk festival? From: musicmick Date: 01 Jul 02 - 07:51 PM Well, no, it wasn't a folk festival in the sense of the music, of course. It was more a political/cultural/revolutionary celebration of coming of age. Had Timothy Leary had a band, he would have been the hit of the show. The importance of Woodstock wasn't realized until that "free" spirit began defining the era to the general public. Of course popular acceptance is the death of rebellion and when Peter Lawford started wearing flowers, I knew the jig was up. Mike Miller |
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Subject: RE: Was Woodstock a folk festival? From: Janice in NJ Date: 01 Jul 02 - 09:59 PM Jerry, I was also there, at least for the first two days. That was less than two months after the Stonewall Rebellion, an event which really opened my then young eyes. Looking back on those days in general and on the Woodstock festival in particular, it is hard to minimize the amount of in-your-face homophobia there was back then, even within the so-called counter-culture. Maybe I should say especially within the counter-culture. But then the amount of macho posturing within the folk world was nearly as bad. That was until Meg and Holly and Pat came along! |
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Subject: RE: Was Woodstock a folk festival? From: Jerry Rasmussen Date: 01 Jul 02 - 10:50 PM Hi, Janice: Still more than enough homophobia to go around... Jerry |
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Subject: RE: Was Woodstock a folk festival? From: Art Thieme Date: 02 Jul 02 - 12:04 AM Macho posturing is just what straight guys do a lot of. Neither wrong nor right. Just what is----in the culture of that time and place. There was negative macho posturing, yes. And, if there wasn't positive macho posturing, it was what was done because of the way we grew up then and there. I'm not sad about it. I liked a lot of it. It made me emulate certain folk folks like Woody G. and Cisco and Jim Ringer and old Wobblys I met out there. If singing about tough times and adventurous rootin'-tootin' guys (and gals too) ---cowboys and gunslingers and lumberjacks and miners and, yes, whalermen was what you are calling "macho posturing in the folk scene", well, all I can tell ya is that that was me then and it's great to be able to think back those old times whenever I choose to find those memories. It wasn't a bad way to be then and it's still ME in these more ambiguous and differently defined times. But maybe I'm just old fashioned. Art Thieme |
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Subject: RE: Was Woodstock a folk festival? From: musicmick Date: 02 Jul 02 - 01:15 AM You're not old fashioned. You are just standing in the face of contemporary political correctnesss. Behavior is neither right nor wrong, it is merely timely. We have evolved our attitudes toward homosexuality in a mixed society from illegal to decriminalized to permitted to accepted to, if all goes as planned, mandatory. I think that alternate lifestyles need promotional slogans to make them more mainstream. Fortunately, I have a few suggestions. For the promiscuous ANY PORTHOLE IN A STORM. For adulturors, ONE MAN'S MATE IS ANOTHER MAN'S PASSION. For crossdressers, COURT TVs. For the undecided, A BISEXUAL BUILT FOR TWO. Damn, these are easy. Mike Miller |
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Subject: RE: Was Woodstock a folk festival? From: fogie Date: 02 Jul 02 - 05:21 AM It was a popular music festival, don't forget the Incredible string band, It was a commercial enterprise, that resonated with rebellion against conventions. To me it seemed that there was a more varied menu of music in those days. Is this a fogies nostalgic look at whats happened to music nowadays, or what? Ive just watched the TV coverage of Glastonbury, and apart from the world / jazz stage most of the music was depressingly similar (excluding the veterans). |
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Subject: RE: Was Woodstock a folk festival? From: greg stephens Date: 02 Jul 02 - 08:11 AM fogie, that's a valid criticism of TV coverage of Glastonbury, but it's not a fair comment on Glastonbury itself. You can get absolutely everything at Glastonbury. I've played there seven or eight times, and you cant get less mainstream than me. Get down there sometime, you'd be amazed. |
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Subject: RE: Was Woodstock a folk festival? From: Barry Finn Date: 02 Jul 02 - 09:25 PM No Way, it wasn't even close to a folk festival & it wasn't at all like the few Newport festivals I had already been to. It was a counter-culture love-in, mud-in, skinny dipping, drug taking, boze gulping, kids music party & I loved it none the less (hey, I was only 18). Most (most not all) of the musicains/groups were not folk, some may have drifted that way later. There were only, maybe 4, of the acts I had never seen (didn't get to see or hear any music, to much party), and those that I had they were considered alot of things but not folk. Here is a list of performers: Joan Baez, Arlo Guthrie, Tim Hardin, Incredible String, The Band, Ravi Shankar, Richie Havens, Sly and the Family Stone, Bert Sommer, Sweetwater, Quill, Canned Heat, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Jefferson Airplane, The Who, Grateful Dead, Keef Hartley, Blood, Sweat and Tears, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Santana, Jeff Beck Group, The Band, Ten Years After, Johnny Winter, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Joe Cocker, Mountain, Melanie, Sha-Na-Na, John Sebastian, Country Joe and the Fish & the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. |
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Subject: RE: Was Woodstock a folk festival? From: Art Thieme Date: 03 Jul 02 - 12:01 AM Once again I was being facetious in my post about Wdstk being a big school assembly. But after reading Barry's post I can see I might've been more right than not. And those "artists-in-the-schools-programs" sure did get me through some otherwise slow years in the 70s and 80s----especially the Bicentennial celebration year -- circa 1976. I think I did over 350 school programs that year. Even paid cash for our first new car ever. It sure is good to see Mr. Finn back and posting !!! Art Thieme |
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Subject: RE: Was Woodstock a folk festival? From: Barry Finn Date: 03 Jul 02 - 12:14 AM Thanks Art. |
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