Search - Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs :: Newport Folk Festival: Broadside 1963

Snapshot of the Urban Folk Revival at its Peak

Fred M. Ogburn III | Camden, SC USA | 12/07/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"If you have any serious interest in the Urban Folk Revival of the late 1950s-early 1960s, as well as in roots of the '60s New Left, this is an essential audio document, and a seriously entertaining one as well. Folk Revival Founding Father Pete Seeger and an impossibly young Bob Dylan in a duet... Dylan in a classic antiwar duet with Joan Baez... major young artists unveiled, including Tom Paxton and Phil Ochs, before their major record label debuts... labor songs from Jim Garland... civil rights movement classics rooted in the legendary Freedom Riders movement... one of the great pacifist songs, from the nearly forgotten Sam Hinton... and more.



1963-64 were the years in which the Urban Folk Revival came of age, as documented at Newport, and 1965 was the year Dylan famously went electric and burned down the house, for better and for worse, but 1963 was the year the Greenwich Village-based Folk Movement peaked. This recording best captures its heartbeat. Also of great interest: The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at The Newport Folk Festival 1963-1965; DVD.



Cautionary note: I cannot vouch for sound quality, etc., on the CD version of this classic album, as my own frame of reference is my old vinyl LP that captured my son Lee's interest and imagination while thumbing through my record collection during his childhood in the 1980s.)"