![]() Musicians blended with Beat poets, abstract expressionists, off-Broadway actors, and experimental filmmakers to forge a heady countercultural melting pot. ![]() Sunday-afternoon folk singalongs attracted a cross-section of amateurs and pros, armed with guitars, banjos, and bongos. The seeds of a revival started to blossom, taking root in and around the park. By 1960 the park was teeming with hundreds of young aspiring musicians, most of whom played and sang for free. But in 1945, a printer named George Margolin started performing near the fountain in Washington Square, and the outdoor venue eventually grew to become a gathering place for the full anti-establishment spectrum, including protesters, artists, activists, and musicians. With the advent of the Second World War and the rise of American Patriotism, the appetite for folk music’s politicized messages abated. It was a fertile time for such influential artists to “ the genre of folk music from a quaint musical form associated with rural life to ‘the people’s music’-a weapon of ideological battle to mobilize workers to develop a class consciousness.” In the 1930s, at the height of the Great Depression, radical idealists such as Josh White, Pete Seeger, Burl Ives, Lead Belly, and Woody Guthrie converged in New York. Joan Baez was an essential player in the story of the folk music revival in Greenwich Village, yet the story begins long before her arrival.
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