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Music Festival Days
"WOODSTOCK
An Aquarian Exposition
3 Days of Peace & Music
August 15, 16 & 17, 1969"
Where have all the flowers gone? 🌸
In a time when colours can seem muted, attitudes hardened, and the future accompanied by an ominous hum of uncertainty and anxiety, there is something irresistible about looking back at an era remembered—rightly or wrongly—in brighter colours. The late 1960s and early 1970s were certainly no idyll, but amid the turmoil was an exuberant belief that the world could be changed. Flowers, music, colour, experimentation and peace signs became the language of that hope—and part of a past we still carry with us, whether we were there or not.
On this day in 1969, nearly half a million people gathered on a dairy farm in Bethel, New York, for what would become the most famous music festival in history: Woodstock.
Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Who, Santana, Jefferson Airplane, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Joe Cocker, Joan Baez, Richie Havens, Arlo Guthrie, Sly and the Family Stone and many more brought together rock, blues, soul, folk, country and psychedelia on one increasingly muddy farm.
Folk was an important thread running through the music of the late '60s and early '70s. Joan Baez, Arlo Guthrie and Richie Havens came directly from the American folk tradition, while Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young carried its acoustic sound and close harmonies into folk-rock. Behind that revival lay much older musical traditions brought to North America by generations of Scottish, Irish, English and Welsh emigrants—the ballads, fiddle tunes and dance music that became part of the ancestry of Appalachian, old-time, country and American folk.
Woodstock even had its own distinctly Scottish contribution: Edinburgh's Incredible String Band, whose wonderfully eccentric mixture of British folk, unusual instruments, Eastern influences and psychedelia seems almost tailor-made for the period.
The Scottish textile town of Paisley provides another colourful association. So closely was the town associated with the swirling boteh motif that the pattern took its name—and by the late '60s and early '70s, paisley had escaped onto shirts, dresses, scarves, album covers and posters in glorious psychedelic colours.
Paisley Sky Tartan captures that same flower-power punch: blue for the open sky, white for peace, and brilliant red-oranges and golds recalling the fashions, posters and psychedelic art of the period.
The photographs and documentaries have given us the enduring image: summer fields, flowers, fringe, paisley, peace signs and music drifting through the air. Reality included rain, monumental traffic jams, food shortages, inadequate facilities and a great deal of mud—but somehow that hasn't dimmed the colours.
More than half a century later, Woodstock remains a cultural shorthand for that remarkable moment when music, fashion, art and youthful optimism collided—and even generations with no personal memory of it are looking back to the music, colours and attitudes in response to the cultural anxieties of today.
Whether or not you were there, perhaps today is a good day for a backward glance—to the music, the flowers, the glorious colours, and above all to that stubbornly appealing belief that the future might still be made a little brighter by the people themselves. ❤️ 🧡 💛 💚 💙 🎶🎶 🎶 ☮️ ☮️ ☮️ 🌸 🌸 🌸 ✌️ ✌️ ✌️
The roots of rock music reach much farther back than electric guitars and amplifiers. Behind the folk, country, blues and rock music of the 1950s and 1960s lies an older tradition of ballads, dance tunes and storytelling songs carried to North America by generations of immigrants. Scottish, Irish and other British folk traditions became especially important in Appalachia, where old songs and fiddle tunes were preserved, adapted and gradually mixed with African American musical traditions and other American influences.
By the twentieth century, those traditions had branched into Appalachian music, country, bluegrass and the American folk revival. The folk revival of the 1950s and early 1960s brought traditional ballads and acoustic music back to a mass audience, while performers increasingly combined them with blues, gospel, jazz and contemporary songwriting. Artists such as Joan Baez, Richie Havens and Arlo Guthrie, who would later appear at Woodstock, belonged to this broad folk world even though their individual musical influences were considerably more varied.
Across the Atlantic, something similar was happening in Britain. Scottish, Irish and English musicians were rediscovering their own traditional music while experimenting with blues, jazz, psychedelia and amplified instruments. Glasgow-born Donovan became one of the best-known figures in psychedelic folk, while Scottish musicians Robin Williamson and Mike Heron of the Incredible String Band pushed traditional and folk-derived music into much stranger psychedelic territory. The Incredible String Band's appearance at Woodstock provides a particularly direct Scottish link between the older folk revival and the experimental music of the late 1960s.
Rock therefore did not simply replace folk music; in many respects it grew alongside it and borrowed from it. The old ballad's narrative, the fiddle tune's repeated phrases, the communal song, the wandering singer and the idea of music as a vehicle for social commentary all survived in altered forms. By the time half a million people gathered at Woodstock in August 1969, centuries-old musical traditions had been mixed with blues, gospel, country, jazz, amplification and the new possibilities of the recording studio. Beneath some of the most modern sounds of the late 1960s were musical threads that stretched back across the Atlantic—and, in some cases, back to Scotland and Ireland.
For a backward glance to those earlier days, click the Woodstock poster for a documentary on this festival.