Levon Helm
Levon Helm was the heartbeat of The Band and, in his final years, the soul of Woodstock itself. Born Mark Lavon Helm on May 26, 1940, in Elaine, Arkansas, he grew up in the cotton country of the Mississippi Delta — a landscape that imprinted itself on every beat he ever played. He graduated from […]
Van Morrison
Van Morrison’s Woodstock period is one of the most creatively fertile stretches in modern music. The Belfast-born singer-songwriter settled in Woodstock, New York, around 1969, joining the constellation of artists drawn to the Catskills by Albert Grossman’s gravitational pull. What Morrison produced during his years in Upstate New York — including the album many consider […]
John Sebastian
John Sebastian is a founding architect of American folk-rock, a Woodstock legend in both the literal and figurative sense, and a songwriter whose catalog defined a generation. Born on March 17, 1944, in New York City’s Greenwich Village, Sebastian grew up surrounded by folk music royalty — his father was a classical harmonica virtuoso, and […]
Amy Helm
Amy Helm carries one of the heaviest names in American music — daughter of Levon Helm, the drummer and vocalist of The Band — and she has spent her career honoring that legacy while forging a voice and a path unmistakably her own. Raised in Woodstock, New York, Helm is a singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist […]
Cindy Cashdollar
Cindy Cashdollar is one of the most accomplished and versatile string players in American roots music — a Woodstock, New York, native whose mastery of the Dobro, lap steel, and steel guitar has made her the go-to collaborator for artists ranging from Bob Dylan to Asleep at the Wheel. With five Grammy Awards and a […]
Sean Rowe
Sean Rowe is the kind of artist who makes you believe that a voice alone can fill a room, a canyon, or an entire concert hall. The Troy, New York, singer-songwriter possesses one of the most arresting baritones in American folk music — a deep, resonant instrument that NPR once noted could “crush granite” — […]
Bob Dylan (Woodstock Period)
Bob Dylan did not create Woodstock’s music scene, but he made it mythic. The most influential songwriter of the twentieth century spent the better part of five years in the Catskill Mountains, and the work he produced there — during a period of intense privacy, recovery, and reinvention — reshaped the trajectory of American popular […]
Sawyer Fredericks
Sawyer Fredericks was 16 years old, living on an 88-acre farm near Fultonville, New York, when he won Season 8 of NBC’s The Voice in 2015 — the youngest male winner in the show’s history. But the raw, weathered quality of his voice suggested someone who had been singing for decades, not years. In a […]
Jeb Puryear
Jeb Puryear is the architect of one of Upstate New York’s most enduring contributions to American roots music. As co-founder of both Donna the Buffalo and the Finger Lakes GrassRoots Festival of Music and Dance, the Trumansburg, New York, guitarist has spent more than three decades building a musical ecosystem in the Finger Lakes region […]
10,000 Maniacs
10,000 Maniacs put Jamestown, New York, on the national music map. Founded in 1981 in this small Chautauqua County city near the Pennsylvania border, the band became one of the most important acts of the college rock and alternative rock movements of the 1980s and early 1990s, led by the singular voice and lyrical intelligence […]