Differing Views on the 1969 Woodstock Music Festival

Differing Views on the 1969 Woodstock Music Festival

On August 15, 1969 at five-o’clock p.m., on a 600-acre hog farm in the small town of Bethel, NY, Richie Havens took the stage as the opening act at the legendary Woodstock Festival. Destined to become the largest gathering of people in one place at one time, Woodstock stood for three days of peace, love, and music amidst the horrors of the Vietnam War. Hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children made their way to the Catskills in New York to take part in the festival and hear their favorite music groups live. Even though tickets for the event had been pre-sold, the directors of the Woodstock declared it a free event on the same day that it started. All over the country people watched footage and read about the festival that many believed was going to be a disaster. But they were proved wrong. Music was the peacekeeper at Woodstock, as the people in attendance listened to over twenty-five music groups that performed from the afternoon of August 15 through the morning of August 18. This weekend during 1969 marks a milestone in American history, where almost 500,000 people joined together in peace for the sake of music.

Since that mesmerizing time during the August of 1969, numerous books have been written about the Woodstock Musical Festival. The books allow people to dig deeper and go behind the scenes to find out what made Woodstock such a success. On the other hand, one can always search the newspaper archives and retrieve an account of Woodstock from a reporter’s view at the same time the festival occurred. The only difference between a book written at a later date and a newspaper article written during the summer of 1969 is the formality. ...

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...n the same level of formality as does the newspaper articles. Both present the material about Woodstock in a different manner, but at the same time they both include very pertinent information about the festival. Each form of writing puts its own twist on the interpretation of Woodstock.

Clearly there are differences in the way that Woodstock was presented in the 1969 Washington Post and in the 1979 book, Barefoot in Babylon. Both prove to be very acceptable sources on the Woodstock festival. From the kind of information given in the sources to the form of writing used to the formality of the content, they all add up to two different views about Woodstock.

Works Cited

Spitz, Robert Stephen. Barefoot in Babylon: The Creation of the Woodstock Music Festival, 1969. New York: The Viking Press, 1979.

The Washington Post, August 15 – 21, 1969.