Welcome
Welcome to The Berkeley Folk Music Festival & the Folk Revival on the US West Coast—An Introduction, a digital exhibit that presents the story of the Berkeley Folk Music Festival, which took place on the campus of the University of California between 1958 and 1970. The Exhibit was curated from the Berkeley Folk Music Festival Archive, a repository of roughly 33,500 artifacts housed at Northwestern University Libraries and now fully digitized through a National Endowment for the Humanities Preservation and Access Grant. Much of the Berkeley Archive has never been seen or heard before publicly.
Within the Exhibit, a narrative history points to the understudied significance of California and the West Coast in the larger story of the American folk music revival. It also shows how materials in the Berkeley Folk Music Festival Archive raise important questions about race, class, gender, region, higher education, public space, cultural heritage, and the practice of American democracy during the decades after World War II. The exhibit’s sections are navigable both through the “Exhibit” link located at the top menu and through buttons placed at the bottom of each page. Additionally, Scott Krafft, Curator of the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections at Northwestern University Libraries, provides a Foreword that explains how the Berkeley Archive made its way from California to Evanston, Illinois.
Whether you are curious to look at the many never-before-seen photographs of famous folk legends or you wish to investigate the themes and issues of the Berkeley Folk Music Festival more deeply, we hope you enjoy learning about the history of this remarkable event and the archival treasure that is the Berkeley Folk Music Festival Archive.
Dr. Michael J. Kramer
Exhibit Curator
Assistant Professor, Department of History, SUNY Brockport