Folk City

From Washington Square Park and the Gaslight Cafe© to WNYC Radio and Folkways Records, New York City's cultural, artistic, and commercial assets helped to shape a distinctively urban breeding ground for the famous folk music revival of the 1950s and '60s. Folk City, by Stephen Petrus and Ronald Cohen, explores New York's central role in fueling the nationwide craze for folk music in postwar America. The musical form blossomed particularly in Greenwich Village, the famed neighborhood that had long nurtured unconventional art, progressive politics, and countercultural trends. But the phenomenon was not inevitable. After all, folk music was largely rural in origins, the songs of peasants in the Old World and then of sailors, cowboys, lumberjacks, coal miners, chain gangs, and others across the United States. How it became urban and modern is a fascinating story, one that involves the efforts of record company producers and executives, club owners, concert promoters, festival