The Now Legendary Woodstock Festival Took Place on a Farm in New York States 55 Years Ago this August 15th, 16th and 17th
By Niagara At Large reporter and publisher Doug Draper
Posted August 15th, 2024 on Niagara At Large
It was August 1969 and my brother and I were walking to a record store in downtown St. Catharines and in the window we saw this colourful poster featuring a white dove perched on the arm of a guitar.
The poster read; “Woodstock Music & Art Festival” and listed some of the best of the best performers of the time who would play there – Jimi Hendrix, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, The Who, Santana, Jefferson Airplane and Sly & The Family Stone, just to name a few.
Tickets for what the poster promised to be this “Three Days of Peace & Music” in a place called White Lake in the Catskills of New York were – believe it or not – $6.50 a day or $18.00 for all three days. (Compare that to tickets ranging above $1,000 to see Taylor Swift in concert today.)
My brother and I said; ‘Wow, we sure would love to go to that’. But we didn’t have wheels, our parents thought we were a bit too young to attend what they and many of their peers at the time feared would turn into a drug-drenched, hippie love-in, and we were getting ready to go on a family vacation to one of our favourite summer places along the Atlantic coast, Cape Cod.
There were reports on the news that Woodstock might turn into a disaster, requiring the military to come in to maintain control.
Instead, Woodstock lived up to its billing as festival of peace and music, drawing a then record crowd of close to half a million people on the rolling pastures of Max Yasgur’s farm.
An aerial shot of the Woodstock Festival in progress, August 1969
Along with the great performances, it may forever be remembered by those of us who were coming of age in the 1960s as a welcome oasis during a time of war, campus protests, struggles for civil rights and assassinations of some of the era’s great public figures.
As recently as this August, the Film House in St. Catharines screened the documentary movie onthe Woodstock Festival and there have been a number of mentions of its 55th anniversary in the media.
In these ‘Dog Days of Summer’ when many of us want an escape from so much bad news, I hope you don’t mind if I pay tribute to this epic, good-time event too.
If you click on the screen immediately below, you can hear Crosby, Stills, Crosby & Nash performing Joni Mitchell’s musical tribute to music over pictures capturing what was going down at the festival itself –
Finally, I am posting the performance of a song by Ritchie Havens, who was the first to hit the stage during the three0day festival. The song, called ‘Freedom’, may, in certain ways, be just as relevant in the times we live in today –
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Here is wishing you all, this August, summer days filled with peace and good music – Doug Draper, Niagara At Large
P.S. – My parents and their peers weren’t completely wrong. There was this iconic “brown acid” warning delivered from the stage at the Woodstock festival. Click on the screen below to hear it –
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