When it comes to Creative Scenes of people in the United States, there are only a few that rank with Greenwich Village. Hollywood for movies and TV, New Orleans for jazz, Nashville for country music, maybe Austin these days for music and technical innovation. Greenwich Village in New York City had a long history of artists, writers, and free thinkers. This documentary, Greenwich Village: Music That Defined a Generation, focuses on the folk music music scene that formed in the Village in the 1960's, and sparked the singer/songwriter movement, along with much more. It's narrated by Susan Sarandon.
I was raised as a dorky kid in small towns and rural areas of Ohio. As a very little kid, the radio provided my music, I remember being 5 or 6 years old and listening to Jim Croce, Three Dog Night, and The Guess Who. I didn't know who the bands were, I just loved the songs. It picked what I heard, depending on the station. My mom had a country station on wherever we lived, so that was the continual soundtrack of the kitchen or living room in our house growing up. I wasn't a fan of country music, with a few exceptions, like Johnny Cash. I got my own record player when I was 8, in third grade, and I could play a few of my parents' albums, and my mom's old 45's, mostly older standards. Neither of my parents were into rock n' roll.
The first album I remember owning, that I got to pick was John Denver's Greatest Hits, Vol. 2. Between my mom's country music, and my dad's big band and swing, I became a fan of singer/songwriters, John Denver being the first. While he wasn't a major part of the scene, he was one of dozens of musicians of that era that made their way through the Greenwich Village coffeehouse scene in the 1960's.
The odd little bit of Manhattan, clustered around Washington Square Park, had been a cloister of all kinds of unusual and creative people for 50 years or more when it began to attract musicians like Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, and so many more in the early 1960's. Beginning as folk singers, they were singing songs often written decades before. This group mingled around Greenwich Village, talking, singing, philosophising, drinking, arguing, sharing ideas, and playing music with each other, as musicians do. Over the course of a few years, many began to write their own songs. They inspired each other, and millions more people, directly and indirectly, through their music, and later through the musicians following their lead.
As a kid in rural Ohio, listening to John Denver and looking out my window at the cow pasture, even I heard of Greenwich Village. It was one of the only art and music scenes I ever heard about as a Generation X kid in the 1970's. Now cities everywhere have "arts districts," many far to expensive for emerging artists to live in anymore. But some are still filled with art. But back then, in the early and mid 1970's, Greenwich Village was one of the only known "scenes" of creative people those of us across the U.S. ever heard of, Hollywood, Broadway, Nahsville, and New Orleans being the others.
This documentary features many of the musicians from that scene tell their own stories of what it was like, and how it evolved while they were a part of it. In it we hear from Pete Seger, Arlo Guthrie, Happy Traum, David Amram, Richie Havens, Oscar Brand, Judy Collins, Don McClean, Jose' Feliciano, Tom Paxton, Tom Chapin, Carolyn Hester, Buffy Saint-Marie, Steve Earle, Carly Simon, and many more. The later part of the documentary goes more into the social and political aspects of the late 1960's, and how the folk music movement of the Village influenced the folk rock and mainstream rock music of the late 1960's and 1970's. This is a great look at an epic period in the timeline of Greenwich Village, and why it was a cultural and creative force in 20th century America
I'm going to be looking into all kinds of Creative Scenes in this blog, going forward. I've been writing for years about the economic troubles I see us heading into in the coming years, and how I think the 2020's will be a major transformative period in human history. I believe we are heading out of the final phase of the Industrial Age, and into the still emerging Information Age. I think Creative Scenes of many different varieties, from groups of musicians to high tech start-ups, and many kinds in between, will be a huge part of the change happening in this decade, and beyond. To get an idea of what makes great creative scenes, I'll be looking at lots of them, large and small. Greenwich Village is one of the most influential Creative Scenes in American history, so this is a great place to begin.
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