Berkeley Folk Music Festival
American folk music festival, 1958-1970
The Berkeley Folk Music Festival was an annual folk music festival held from 1958 to 1970 in Berkeley, California. It was directed by Barry Olivier. The Festival was one of the preeminent folk festivals on the West Coast, predating the more popular Newport Folk Festival on the East Coast.
Notable performers and artists include Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Doc Watson, Alan Lomax, Howlin' Wolf, Phil Ochs, Alice Stuart, Jean Ritchie, Jean Redpath, Jesse Fuller, Big Mama Thornton, Mance Lipscomb, Mississippi John Hurt, Archie Green, Alan Dundes, Bess Lomax Hawes, Ewan MacColl, John Fahey, Red Krayola, Richie Havens, Phil Spector, Robbie Basho, the Jefferson Airplane, the Youngbloods, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, Janice Ian, Country Joe and the Fish, and more.
History
1967–1970: Counterculture Years
The festival's willingness to embrace rock music and other forms of what would become known as roots music or Americana makes it markedly different from other folk festivals such as Newport. It exemplified the psychedelic counterculture scene of the West Coast—and the Bay Area in particular, with the festival dedicating performances to the Civil rights and Vietnam war protests.
References
Kramer, Michael J. "The Berkeley Folk Music Festival Project". Northwestern University. Retrieved 31 July 2015.
“Berkeley Folk Music Festival” enters the record as american folk music festival, 1958-1970. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Berkeley, Folk and Music can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16909705. VIAF identifies the subject as 256092330. The Library of Congress control number is n2012053361. None of the 3 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1958, 1970, 1967 and 2015.
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This entry incorporates text from “Berkeley Folk Music Festival” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.