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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
The Band
The Band did not come from Woodstock — they came to it, and in doing so, they made the town a creative landmark. The group — Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, Garth Hudson, and Levon Helm — began as the Hawks, the backing band for rockabilly wild man Ronnie Hawkins, touring the Canadian bar […]
Ani DiFranco
Before the term “independent music” became an industry buzzword, Ani DiFranco was living it. Born Angela Maria DiFranco on September 23, 1970, in Buffalo, New York, she built one of the most remarkable careers in modern music entirely on her own terms — without a major label, without radio play, and without compromise. In doing […]
Natalie Merchant
Natalie Merchant was born on October 26, 1963, in Jamestown, New York — a small city in the southwestern corner of the state, closer to Erie, Pennsylvania, than to any major New York metropolitan area. At 16, she dropped out of high school to work at a grocery store. At 17, she joined 10,000 Maniacs. […]
Albert Grossman
Albert Grossman did not play an instrument, sing a note, or write a lyric. What he did was arguably more consequential: he built the infrastructure that turned Woodstock, New York, from a quiet artists’ colony into the most mythologized music town in American history. Born on May 21, 1926, in Chicago, Grossman earned an economics […]
Michael Lang
Michael Lang was the dreamer who made Woodstock real. Born on December 11, 1944, in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn, Lang briefly attended New York University before dropping out in 1967 and moving to Coconut Grove, Florida, where he opened a head shop and began promoting concerts. His first major production, the Miami Pop Festival […]