Woodstock Folk Fest, Part III: Sonia Malkine
Sonia Malkine, an accomplished chanteuse, joined Woodstock’s folk singing establishment in the late 1950s. Together with Eleanor Walden, Sam Eskin, Billy Faier and several others, she co-founded the Woodstock Folk Festival in 1962.
Sonia was born in France in 1923, the daughter of Anarcho-Syndicalist activists. When the Second World War broke out she and her family fled Paris to Toulouse. In 1943 Sonia joined the Spanish Resistance, which fought alongside the French underground forces. She worked until 1945 as a messenger for the Resistance.
Through her mother, May Picqueray, Sonia met and married Georges Malkine, the French Surrealist painter. Together they immigrated to the United States. One day Sonia’s mother came to visit the family in New York City. She learned that Stella Ballantine, niece of her old friend, Emma Goldman, lived in Woodstock, NY. The Malkines visited Woodstock and decided to relocate in 1951. At first they stayed on the Maverick, but in 1952 they moved to the Woodstock hamlet of Shady. Read the rest of this entry »
Woodstock Folk Fest, Part II: Billy Faier
Billy Faier, one of the co-founders of the Woodstock Folk Festival, came to Woodstock as 14-year-old in 1945. According to Eleanor Walden, Billy was a very independent teenager. She remembers visiting his apartment in the mid-1940s in Greenwich Village and listening to folk and blues records. One time in 1946 she and Billy came up to Woodstock for the weekend. Faier loved Woodstock. When he was growing up in Brooklyn, he recalls on his website, he was patronized, ignored and abused by so-called schoolmates. Upon relocating to Woodstock he attended Kingston High School and found he was treated much the same. However, when he moved out and about in the Woodstock community he encountered a group of people who accepted him. These were the artists of the Woodstock Art Colony.
During the 1950s Faier became proficient on the five-string banjo. He recorded a series of albums, including two for the Riverside label and another on Electra. In 1959 he appeared at the Newport Folk Festival. By 1962 Billy was an accomplished and connected folk music veteran, so it makes sense that he co-founded the Woodstock Folk Festival, which occurred that year. After the festival Bernard and Mary Lou Paturel hired him as a talent booker for the Café Espresso.
The Woodstock Folk Festival
Dan Adams, Eleanor Walden and Gerry Parsons at the Woodstock Folk Festival in 1962
Eleanor Walden, social activist and folksinger, recently told me in a phone interview that she believes she was the catalyst for the first Woodstock Festival. That festival took place in 1962 at the Woodstock Estates on Friday, September 14th, through Sunday, September 16th.
Pete Seeger donated concert proceeds from an August gig at the Woodstock Playhouse to help fund the festival. According to the program there were square and folk dances, demonstrations, dulcimer-making workshops, storytelling and a hootenanny. The model for the festival was to bring country traditional singers and city topical-political songwriters into the same arena to share influences. Altogether there were nine co-founders and organizers. They included folksingers Eleanor Walden, Mona and Frank Fletcher, Sonia Malkine, Billy Faier, producer Bill Hoffman and folklorist Sam Eskin. Pete and the co-founders mentioned above, plus Barbara Moncure, Harry Siemsen, Squire Elwyn Davis, and recording artists Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Hedy West and Native American singer/songwriter Peter LaFarge, all performed during the festival. Fiona Fletcher, Mona and Frank Fletcher’s daughter, said that she and her siblings had a blast. They were allowed to stay up late, and they had the run of the event.
Eleanor Walden took a circuitous route to Woodstock. She was raised in New York’s Greenwich Village and her father was a Wobbly. She grew up knowing Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and Lee Hays. She remembers the weekly songfests in Washington Square Park in the 1940s. In 1948 when the Progressive Party organized the singing Wallace Caravans she went on one of those multi-state tours with Pete Seeger. Walden says she was not a good musician, but she did sing well. In fact, when Lee Hays and some others were forming a group, she was invited to join them. She says she laughed off the invitation, claiming that she was too young. This berth was offered to Ronnie Gilbert, and The Weavers, as the group became known, went on to fame and fortune with such hits as “Goodnight Irene” and “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena.” Read the rest of this entry »
Nina Yankowitz Recalls Woodstock’s Group 212
A 1968 Draped Painting by Nina Yankowitz: "Oh Say Can you See?"
The Woodstock Festival of 1969 was officially named the Woodstock Music & Art Fair. According to Michael Lang in Roots of the 1969 Woodstock Festival, the inclusion of “art” in the festival name was a nod to Woodstock, NY’s status as an art colony—beginning in the early 1900s with Byrdcliffe and the Maverick Festivals, and later with organizations like Group 212.
Recently I spoke by phone with Nina Yankowitz of nyartprojects about her days at Group 212. A 1969 Fine Arts graduate of the School of Visual Arts, Yankowitz doesn’t recall where she first heard about the fusion collective, but she says that word about it was on the street in NYC’s Greenwich Village. Nina loved Group 212′s fearless collaborative spirit, and remembers that she first installed her draped paintings on the trees in the surrounding Group 212 landscape. She says that Group 212′s propulsive and adventurous style of mixing music, painting, sculpture, photography, electronic sounds, poetry, and performance art opened her up to embrace new technologies and emerging artistic disciplines. For example, she met Ken Werner, a musician, at 212 in the summer of 1968, and she recalls their collaboration. Werner made an audio rendition to realize Nina’s desire to include sound that would mimic the musical score, Oh Say Can You See, on her draped canvas. This embodied the concept of hearing and seeing sounds as they unfolded from her draped paintings. The installation was exhibited later that year at Kornblee Gallery in New York City.
Nina Yankowitz (in Foreground) Dancing at Group 212
Yankowitz remembers running to catch the bus to Greenwich Village from South Orange Junior High School in New Jersey. She would sneak out of school to attend performances by Dylan and Hugh Romney at the Cafe Wha in the Village, returning without her delinquency having been discovered. Her later Woodstock experience put her in touch with many new and exciting musicians and artistic collaborators. She met people like Sunny Murray, Dave Burrell, and Chuck Santon—an artist who spent most of his time at Robert Wilson‘s Byrdcliffe, devoted to experimental workshops/productions. She also met musician Juma Sultan, and it was he who encouraged Nina and a friend to dance while Juma, Archie Shepp, Sunny Murray, and Dave Burrell were jamming. She remembers the music director wanting to “pull the cane around our necks!” Juma also took her to Byrdcliffe to meet Bob Dylan, and they, with others from the community, attended a Sound-Out at Pan Copeland’s farm. Yankowitz recalls people jumping through the fences, lying on the grass and watching acts like Tim Hardin and Ritchie Havens.
One detail eludes Nina about her time at Group 212. She remembers a friend there who created marvelous performances based upon the myth of Icarus. He also made beautiful photographs with his box camera, and she wonders what happened to the fellow who created and played this bird-man role. Can anyone help her out on that?
~Weston Blelock
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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