Foreword
One question that I have heard many times is this one: why is the archive of the Berkeley Folk Music Festival at Northwestern? Given that the event took place at the University of California in Berkeley, why didn’t the collection end up preserved at that institution’s library? The short answer is that in 1973 we, Northwestern University Libraries, bought the archive from the Festival’s creator and manager, Barry Olivier, in a deal brokered by book seller John Swingle.
Of course, libraries don’t buy things, people do. In the case of the Berkeley Folk Music Festival archive, those people were former Assistant University Librarian Richard Press and R. Russell Maylone, the former curator of the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections. Between 1969 and 1974, in the short span of years that these two friends worked side by side at Northwestern, they brought in some of the key treasures of our Special Collections department. One of those treasures was the Berkeley Folk Music Festival Collection.
Barry Olivier ran the Festival for over a decade, from 1958 to 1970, in a cooperative arrangement with the University of California at Berkeley. It was a deal analogous to that between an author and a publisher. A meticulous organizer, Olivier saved the photographs, posters, handbills, ephemeral memos, correspondence, news clippings, and more that now occupy many shelves of our library’s stacks. With a growing family and a need for space at his home, Olivier decided to try to sell what he knew to be an historically important body of material. He connected with John Swingle, the proprietor of the Alta California Bookstore, which was based in the Berkeley area. Like Olivier, Swingle was interested in music and locally prominent. Indeed, for several years at the tail end of the 1960s Swingle was a member of the Berkeley City Council and as such played a political role in Berkeley’s volatile 1969 People’s Park controversy.
According to Russell Maylone, it was Richard Press who made the initial connection with John Swingle that led to the archive’s purchase. Press had obtained his Master’s degree in Library Science at Berkeley in 1959 and retained many Bay Area book world connections. It is possible that he’d attended one of the early Folk Festivals, and it seems likely that he was at the very least aware of their existence during his student years.
When I began working in Special Collections in the 1990s, Russell Maylone, a wonderful man, was still serving as our curator. One thing I soon learned from him and from my other colleagues in “Spec” was that one of our collecting themes was revolutionary social movements, and one of our key strengths within that parameter was documentation of the cultural changes of the so called “Long Sixties,” that period of dramatic worldwide cultural changes which in the United States was bookended by the early Cold War years and the 1980 presidential election of former California governor Ronald Reagan.
It is within that context at the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections that the Berkeley Collection exists. It joins distinctive materials such as a small archive of the 1964 Free Speech Movement at Berkeley (where Festival favorite Joan Baez appeared in support of student protesters); thousands of underground newspapers, magazines, and political pamphlets; hundreds of psychedelic promotional posters from the San Francisco rock concerts sponsored by Bill Graham and the Family Dog; a striking array of Underground Comix; and one of the country’s largest collections of documents relating to Second Wave feminism.
Since the time we acquired the Berkeley archive in 1973 we have continued to add related material, perhaps most saliently the 2014 gift of a fantastic collection of thousands of folk music journals from around the world that had been gathered by the folk musician and activist Faith Petric (1915-2013). Known by some as “the Fort Knox of folk music,” Petric had gathered the materials for the use of the San Francisco Folk Music Club, which she headed for decades. After her death, the collection was generously donated to us by her daughter Carole Craig.
The Berkeley archive also connects to our Long Sixties art history holdings outside the parameters of folk music. The 2001 acquisition of the archive of the Fluxus-related performance artist Charlotte Moorman, who created and ran the New York Avant Garde Festival from 1963-1981, augments the Berkeley Folk Music Festival research material as a parallel East Coast archive related to the staging of public festivals during this same period of dramatic social change—the era of “Happenings.”
The Moorman archive was eventually mined by author Joan Rothfuss for use towards her acclaimed 2014 biography Topless Cellist: The Improbable Life of Charlotte Moorman, as well being cornerstone to the successful exhibit A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant Garde 1960s-1980s at Northwestern’s Block Museum of Art in 2016. As with the Moorman acquisition, it took some years for the Berkeley archive to step up into the light; in many cases, archival holdings must wait for their key users. I sometimes think that the famous advice given by William Morris in 1880 regarding one’s domestic arrangements also works as an aspirational mantra for library collection building: “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” To be sure, knowing, believing, and beauty are all undoubtedly subjective concepts, shaped by conscious and unconscious assumptions about “the canon” and what is or is not important to save. The logic of collection building in libraries is sometimes just hope and faith that at some point the things we acquire will strike gold with some future researcher. In this case that key researcher, Michael J. Kramer, appeared in 2009.
Though the Berkeley Folk Music Festival archive had been tapped for use by researchers over the years since its arrival at Northwestern, its richness would become more vivid after Kramer—the curator of this online exhibit—entered the reading room of Special Collections to consult some our 1960s underground newspapers. He was conducting research towards what would eventually be published in his 2013 book The Republic of Rock: Music and Citizenship in the Sixties Counterculture. Staffing that reading room desk when Michael arrived was my former department colleague Sigrid Perry, who having worked in Special Collections for decades, knew our collection well. Noting his request for issues of the underground paper the Berkeley Barb, she asked Michael if he was aware that we had the archive of the Berkeley Folk Music Festival and whether he might want to take a look at the finding aid. He did indeed, and as he relayed to me recently, this little reading room desk transaction was the catalyst for not only this present exhibit, but also a set of other activities, including a class in Digitizing Folk Music History that he created while teaching as an adjunct professor at Northwestern.
Kramer’s class, which he has subsequently taught at Middlebury College and SUNY Brockport, centers on the Berkeley Folk Music Festival and has led students to encounter the archive and the subject matters it exemplifies, as well as helping them 
connect the archive to new possibilities of digital scholarship. With help from the library, Michael and his students developed digital history projects about the Berkeley Folk Music Festival and the cultural history of the folk revival and the 1960s. At Northwestern, the class also led to in-person campus visits at the library from Barry Olivier himself, as well as visits from the folklorist-musician Neil Rosenberg and his partner Terri, and by singer-guitarist Alice Stuart, who was a star performer at several of the Berkeley Folk Music Festivals.
After several years of digitizing sections of the archive for Kramer’s students and witnessing its research worth, the library successfully pursued grant funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. This allowed for the digitizing and cataloging of the entire Berkeley archive, now available worldwide through the library’s open-access digital repository. It is a beautiful and fruitful example of collaboration between a research library and a scholar, and the exhibit that Michael has curated is a topping flower. Enjoy!
Scott Krafft
Curator
Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections