Hippies and their Music: Woodstock

The Making of a Legend

One of many popular-music festivals of the 1960s, the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair of 15-17 August 1969 began as an organized event, descended into chaos, and emerged as the most legendary rock festival in history, known simply as Woodstock. It has since come to symbolize an era of peaceful, free-loving, drug-taking hippie youth, carefree before harsher realities hit—such as the untimely drug-related deaths of rockers Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin and the shootings of student protesters and bystanders at Kent State University—all the following year. During and after the 1970s thousands of rock fans claimed to have been present at Woodstock, and it is quite possible they were: the festival attracted nearly half a million people, most in their teens and twenties.

A Surprising Turnout

The promoters of the event hardly expected such a turnout—they expected perhaps two hundred thousand at...

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