The Newport Folk Festival for 2024 is coming up this week. This record collects performances from 61 years ago, by Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Tom Paxton, Sam Hinton, Bob Davenport, The Freedom Singers, Jim Garland, Ed McCurdy, Phil Ochs, Peter La Farge, and Joan Baez. I love seeing the folks we now recognize as giants (Seeger, Dylan, Paxton, Ochs, Baez) alongside lesser known contemporaries like Peter La Farge, Sam Hinton, and Bob Davenport – as they appeared at Newport Folk.
Liner notes credited to “Stacey Williams,” a psuedonym for Robert Shelton who helped early in Dylan’s career.
The word “Broadside” links this record to the age-old tradition of bards and minstrels who commented on the happenings of the day. . . . the “broadside” renaissance of the sixties took many forms, as the contents of this record will show, not exclusively political but ranging over all subjects”
Robert Shelton
My copy is an Italian pressing from the late 70s distributed by Dischi Ricordi S.p.A., which I picked up at a record fair at Mill No. 5.
