Beltane Early Growth Moon
Listening to 1960’s folk on Pandora. Forgot how much folk music figured in the 1960’s. I remember my first anti-American rhetoric coming in the Black Swan Coffee House in Stratford, Ontario where I was for the Shakespeare Festival. It was an anti-Vietnam folk song sung in what would have been 1963 or so. We were had barely begun our operations in Vietnam at that time.
Many of the early protest songs were folk songs, following the long, already established tradition among labor organizers. There’s something about the acoustic, often with no band, that speaks deeper to me. Kate and I support Folk Alley, too, which plays contemporary folk along with the occasional older songs.
The Coffee House circuit was big in the 1960’s a type of caffeine bar very different from Starbucks and Caribou. They are coffee house lite, almost not there as cultural institutions, with their isolated patrons floating on the web while sipping pretentiously named drinks. The 1960’s coffee house was more in line with the 18th and 19th century versions in England where much of the early scientific and industrial revolutions got their start. The main difference is that the 1960’s version featured political plotting, resolve boosting through music and plenty of buzz to work on the next protest late into the night.