Bay Area Folk, Bluegrass, Old-Time and New Acoustic Music – The Boom, Bust & Rebound

Book in progress – to be published in 2027 by The History Press

Photo Courtesy of Northwestern University Library’s “The Berkeley Folk Music Festival & the Folk Revival on the US West Coast“

In 1972, legendary folk musician Mike Seeger “instigated, coordinated and edited” a collection of old-time country tunes by performing artists based in Berkeley, California.  In an excerpt from the liner notes written by traditional musician Rita Weill, she reflected:

“Music is one of the threads of a community’s life-style, and can be found more readily off – stage than on. Although Berkeley is not the country, but is a complexity of cultures and counter-cultures, with many stages and performers of various persuasions …its musical scenes weave a tapestry that covers the community and binds it together with grace, style, humor and rich aural hues. Hence, we call this album, Berkeley Farms. The lives of the musicians represented here, range well into their private and global community in, many ways, but folk music provides the warp and woof of their activities.” 

Berkeley was indeed a folk-boom town with the historic Berkeley Folk Music Festival, numerous coffee houses, and its own magazine, started by Country Joe McDonald.  Across the bay in San Francisco, the Kingston Trio had put folk music on top of the charts with their version of “Tom Dooley” in 1958 and in the early 1960’s. Jerry Garcia and Jorma Kaukonen were playing bluegrass and acoustic blues before plugging in to form the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, respectively, and then unplugged with Old & In The Way and Hot Tuna to expose their musical roots to rock audiences.

The Freight and Salvage Coffee House in Berkeley opened in 1968, continues to offer a stage for both growing number of homegrown and touring bluegrass and old-time string bands, and in the mid-70s David Grisman created a fusion of bluegrass and jazz he called “Dawg music” which in turn spawned numerous adventurous groups who introduced many forms of new acoustic music to the world. Independent record labels like Arhoolie, Kaleidescope, Bay, Takoma and Acoustic Disc and organizations like the San Francisco Folk Club and Berkeley Old Time Music Association helped to both document traditional music and expose listeners to new sounds.

In 2021, Folkways Recordings released a compilation of recordings made at various locations in the San Francisco Bay Area by that puts a spotlight on the significant folk scene that was alive and well throughout the Bay Area.  Some were natives, but most had arrived in the 1960’s in search of the California dream. Entitled the Village Out West the collection put forward the suggestion that while Greenwich Village in New York City was, without a doubt, the epicenter of the folk revival in the 1950s and ‘60s – and San Francisco and Berkeley will always be best remembered for psychedelic rock – the Bay Area has a rich history of not only preserving folk traditions, but is fertile ground for the exploration, enhancement and expansion of American roots music.

This book takes that notion and explores how the coffeehouses, performance halls, festivals and record companies provided the foundation for the kaleidoscopic array of singers and songwriters, blues and bluegrass musicians, concert promoters, record producers and audiences that have navigated the boom, bust and rebound of folk and acoustic music in the Bay Area.