John Herald: Root of Woodstock
Tracy Bigelow Grisman's Gaslight Trio: Ralph Rinzler, Bob Dylan and John Herald
In 1954, a 15-year old Johnny Herald saw Pete Seeger in concert at Camp Woodland, outside Phoenicia, NY. He was so inspired that he vowed he would be a musician, too. Herald, of Armenian-American background, was born and raised in Greenwich Village. His poet father used to take him around to parties where Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie performed live. On the liner notes to Roll on John, Herald recalls “and here I was, somebody that was in on another sort of bohemian revolution in the sense of the folk part of art; folk craft, folk culture and so on.”
Herald began listening to Don Larkin’s New Jersey radio program on bluegrass music (Larkin Barkin’). Soon he was jamming with Bob Dylan, Rory Block and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. In 1959 he joined the Greenbriar Boys with John Yellin and Eric Weissberg. The latter was a fellow alum of Camp Woodland, although they actually met (according to Weissberg) at a freshman mixer at the University of Wisconsin. Things started to heat up after Ralph Rinzler replaced Weissberg in the group. He urged the trio to practice more, and they won first prize for bluegrass in a North Carolina competition. Soon they landed a contract with Maynard Solomon’s Vanguard record label. Read the rest of this entry »
Roots on the Radio
Weston Blelock, co-author of Roots of the 1969 Woodstock Festival: The Backstory to “Woodstock,“ will be interviewed about the Roots book and upcoming Barnes & Noble book event as follows:
10/28 at 9 a.m. on WKZE with Rick Schneider
10/30 at 9:30 a.m. on WKNY with Warren Lawrence
Roots Presentation @ Barnes & Noble on 10/30
Woodstock, NY—October 19, 2009—Weston Blelock and Julia Blelock, co-authors of Roots of the 1969 Woodstock Festival: The Backstory to “Woodstock” will be hosting a PowerPoint presentation and book signing at Barnes & Noble Booksellers, 1177 Ulster Ave., Kingston, NY on Friday, Oct 30, at 7 p.m. The book is a finalist in both the “Popular Culture” and “History: Media/Entertainment” categories of The National Best Books 2009 Awards.
Attendees of the upcoming presentation will learn why the festival was named Woodstock, and why it continues to be so closely associated with the town, even though the concert actually took place in Bethel, NY. The first part of the book features a transcript of a panel discussion that took place in August 2008 among townspeople—including Festival promoter Michael Lang—knowledgeable about the music scene in the late sixties. The second part of the book is a “roots of Woodstock” photo essay that chronicles the Arts and Crafts origins of the town, from its glass-making era in the 1800s to the founding of the Byrdcliffe colony in 1902. In addition, it details the town’s hallowed tradition of weekend-long music concerts, beginning in the early 1900s with Woodstock’s Maverick Festivals, and stretching up through the counter cultural Sound-Outs of the late 1960s. Read the rest of this entry »
Woodstock’s First Hippie
A painting of Hervey White by Arnold Blanch
Hervey White was a storied hippie in the early 1900s. His novels were praised by Theodore Dreiser and he hobnobbed at Jane Addams’s Hull House with such other progressive intellectuals as Clarence Darrow, Sidney Webb and Ramsay MacDonald. It was there that he met Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead. The latter was a wealthy English commoner in search of his own personal utopia. With White and Bolton Brown, Whitehead set out for the East Coast to find his Shangri-la. They soon fetched up in Woodstock, NY. Together the trio co-founded the Byrdcliffe Arts and Crafts Colony, which still thrives under the stewardship of the Woodstock Byrcliffe Guild.
White grew tired of Whitehead’s ways and purchased a 100-acre farm just over the Woodstock town line. He called his patch the Maverick, after an untamed horse. Soon several primitive cabins were built and artists began moving in. White was used to roughing it. He had been born in a sod hut and accumulated savings for his Kansas State University education by working as a cook for his father’s farm workers and doing odd jobs. In 1894, he graduated from Harvard and booked passage in steerage, crossing the Atlantic to Italy. There he traveled on foot and stayed in hostels and workers’ homes. Read the rest of this entry »
Roots Pressroom
Fund-Raiser Concert
To raise money for Woodstock’s Zero-Carbon Initiative, Roots of Woodstock LLC held a "40th anniversary" concert on August 15, 2009, at the Bearsville Theater in Woodstock.
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