As ’60s fade, historians scramble to capture Woodstock’s voices
Museum at site of legendary music event is undertaking 5-year project to record, sift through firsthand accounts
BETHEL, N.Y. — Woodstock didn’t even happen in Woodstock, N.Y.
The fabled music festival, seen as one of the seminal cultural events of the 1960s, took place 60 miles away in Bethel an even smaller village than Woodstock. It’s a fitting misnomer for an event that has become as much legend as reality — and has less to do with location than the memories it evokes about a society’s state of mind at the close of a jumbled decade.
An estimated 450,000 people converged on a swath of land owned by dairy farmer Max Yasgur to attend an “Aquarian Exposition” promising “three days of peace, love and music” from Aug. 15 to 17, 1969. Most were teenagers or young adults — people now approaching the twilight of their lives in an era where only a small portion of the population has living memories of the 1960s.
That ticking clock is why the Museum at Bethel Woods, located on the site of the festival, is immersed in a five-year project to sift facts from the legends and collect firsthand Woodstock memories before they fade away. It’s a quest that has taken museum curators on a cross-country pilgrimage to record and preserve the recollections of those who were there.
“You need to capture the history from the mouths of the people who had the direct experience,” says music journalist Rona Elliot, 77, who has been working as one of the museum’s “community connectors.” Elliot has her own stories about the festival; she was there, working with organizers like Michael Lang, who entrusted her with his archives before his death in 2022.
Woodstock, says Elliot, is “like a jigsaw puzzle — a panoply of everything that happened in the ’60s.”
Woodstock attendees have done hundreds of interviews through the decades, particularly on major festival anniversaries. But the Bethel Woods museum is plunging deeper with a project that began in 2020, relying on techniques similar to those of the late historian Studs Terkel, who produced hundreds of oral histories about what it was like to live through the Great Depression and World War II.
“There is a difference between someone being interviewed for a paper or a documentary and having an oral history catalogued and preserved in a museum,” says Neal Hitch, senior curator and director of the Museum At Bethel Woods. “We had to go to people where they are. If you just call someone on the phone, they aren’t quite sure what to say when we ask you to tell us about these personal, private memories from a festival when they may have been 18 or 19.”
To find and meet people willing to tell their Woodstock tales, the museum received grants totaling more than $235,000 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services — enough money to pay for curators and community connectors such as Elliot to travel the country and record the stories.
The odyssey began in Santa Fe — home to the Hog Farm that provided hippie volunteers such as Hugh “Wavy Gravy” Romney and Lisa Law to help feed the Woodstock crowd. Museum curators have traveled to Florida, hopped on a “Flower Power” cruise ship and visited Columbus, Ohio, before making a California swing earlier this year that included a San Francisco community center located near the former homes of festival performers Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead.
Richard Schoellhorn, 77, made the trip from his Sebastopol, Calif., home to San Francisco to discuss his experience at Woodstock. He was initially hired to be a security guard at the ticketing booth when the festival was supposed to occur in Wallkill, N.Y., before a community backlash prompted a late switch to the Bethel site.
Schoellhorn still reported for work in Bethel, only to promptly discover his services weren’t going to be needed because the festival became so overwhelmed that organizers stopped selling tickets.
“I was walking around at Woodstock, and Hugh Romney comes up to me and says, ‘Are you working?’ ” Schoellhorn recalled to The Associated Press before sitting down to have his oral history recorded. “And I go, ‘No, I just got fired!’ He goes, ‘Well, would you like to volunteer?’ ” He did and ended up working in a tent set up to assist people having bad experiences on hallucinogenic drugs.