History
The Newport Folk Festival was founded in 1959 by George Wein, founder of the already-well-established Newport Jazz Festival, backed by its original board: Theodore Bikel, Oscar Brand, Pete Seeger and Albert Grossman.
The festival is renowned for introducing to a national audience a number of performers who went on to become major stars, most notably Joan Baez by her appearance as an unannounced guest of Bob Gibson in 1959, and Bob Dylan, in turn a guest of Baez at the 1963 festival. Not strictly limited to folk performers, in the 1960s Johnny Cash, Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf just to debut of people like Jose Feliciano in 1964, all performed. The festival also included many musicians of the pre-World War II country blues who figured as influences to the American folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s where artists "lost" since the 1940s were "rediscovered."
The festival in its initial guise ran from 1959 to 1970, with no festivals scheduled in 1961 or 1962. Many of the concerts have provided a rich source of recordings. Murray Lerner directed the 1967 film Festival based on the 1963-1965 festivals.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Most events recorded in history are more remarkable than important, like eclipses of the sun and moon, by which all are attracted, but whose effects no one takes the trouble to calculate.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history is to be read and written.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)