Join PUG Meetup Leader Glenn Lew and the Flea Street Band on August 16th at 6 PM at the Belmont Public Library as we explore the Folk Music Scene of the 50’s and 60’s in the latest Peninsula Ukulele Group Meetup- “The Great Folk Scare of the 60’s”.

The Carter Family in the 20’s, Woody Guthrie in the 30’s, and Pete Seeger & the Weavers in the 40’s and 50’s laid the foundations for many musicians all over the USA and the world to take popular folk music in a new direction. Playing guitars and banjos became all the rage and all of a sudden new songs were being written for the most part using just a few simple chords. So began the Great Folk Scare of the 1960’s or the American Folk Music Revival. It was a “Scare” due to the fact that the 50’s was a time of the Red Scare when many people were blacklisted as Communists including Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and his Weavers. Their music was not allowed on TV or radio well into the 60’s. But a whole crop of new artists came out of the coffee houses from Greenwich Village in NYC to North Beach in San Francisco and filled in the void. They included the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul & Mary, the New Christy Minstrels, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Gordon Lightfoot, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Ian & Sylvia. They started to write and perform fresh, creative, artistic, intellectually and politically relevant songs. We’ll sample some of these great songs in this Meetup for August.