Peace, music and memories: As the 1960s fade, historians scramble to capture Woodstock's voices
An estimated 450,000 people attended the Woodstock festival in August 1969
BETHEL, N.Y. — Woodstock didn't even happen in Woodstock.
The fabled music festival, seen as one of the seminal cultural events of the 1960s, took place 60 miles (96.5 kilometers) away in Bethel, New York, an even smaller village than Woodstock. It's a fitting misnomer for an event that has become as much legend as reality — and has less to do with location than the memories it evokes about a society's state of mind at the close of a jumbled decade.
An estimated 450,000 people converged on a swath of land owned by dairy farmer Max Yasgur to attend an “Aquarian Exposition” promising “three days of peace, love and music" from Aug. 15 to 17, 1969. Most were teenagers or young adults — people now approaching the twilight of their lives in an era where only a small portion of the population has living memories of the 1960s.
That ticking clock is why the Museum at Bethel Woods, located on the site of the festival, is immersed in a five-year project to sift facts from the legends and collect firsthand Woodstock memories before they fade away. It's a quest that has taken museum curators on a cross-country pilgrimage to record and preserve the recollections of those who were there.
“You need to capture the history from the mouths of the people who had the direct experience," says music journalist Rona Elliot, 77, who has been working as one of the museum's “community connectors.” Elliot has her own stories about the festival; she was there, working with organizers like Michael Lang, who entrusted her with his archives before his death in 2022.
Woodstock, says Elliot, is «like a jigsaw puzzle — a panoply of everything that happened in the '60s.”
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