On August 15th 1969, one of the most historic musical events occurred. The Woodstock Music and Art fair was advertised to be
a "Weekend in the Country" with a predicted 160,000 attendees. However, word rapidly spread that a country-side music festival was happening and the prediction of 200,000 attendees was far from accurate. 186,000 tickets were sold, but 500,000 people showed up. This foreshadowed the chaos of the event. Among the crowd of people, joints were passed along, as their peers sang along to the music as if they were echoing what was being performed in front of them. This was their way of expressing their "self- proclaimed right to free love". This became one of the first movements were society learned that it is possible to come together as a group and celebrate harmony and peace. As for the actual festival, performances began at 5:07 pm on August 15th of 1969. The opening performer was Richie Havens and his song, "The Minstrel from Gault". Woodstock would proceed to go on for 3 more days ending on the 18th. Some of the artists included were, Janis Joplin, The Who, Santana, and Joe Cocker. One of the most memorable performers to go was Jimi Hendrix, who performed his rendition of Star Spangled Banner. Originally he was scheduled to preform at midnight, but because time wasn't on their side he went on the 4th day at 9:00 AM. He closed the show. It was a historic event that changed many peoples outlook on life and was a big part of what is known as the hippie movement.
The idea of Woodstock was originally supposed to be a recording studio to be built in Woodstock, New York. It was a small city that many musicians moved to by the late 1960s and so they wanted to build a recording studio there. To promote the building of the recording studio, a festival was suggested so the planning of the rock music festival started and the ticket sales for the festival was supposed to fund the recording studio. It originally was supposed to be staged at the city of Woodstock but they denied permission. So the site of the festival was held at Max Yasgur’s 600-acre dairy farm in Bethel, New York on August 15-17, 1969 and kept the name “Woodstock” because they still wanted to build the recording studio in the city of Woodstock. Since only a few thousand were supposed to attend and only a sum of number of tickets were sold, the festival became free because of how many people who showed up to the festival. When all the people showed up for the festival, ticket booths were not able to set up quickly enough to charge people. The participants demanded it to be free and they got it since security barely even existed, the whole festival itself ended up losing more than $1 million. On the day of the festival, many people who came to the festival were from mainly New York City and other cities. As people got closer and closer to the festival site, there were more and more hitchers who were heading to the place so it was as if they knew something major was going to be happening as they got there. Many hitchhikers had even come from different states because they heard about the news of Woodstock months earlier. Since there were so many people who showed up, transportation was an issue. Originally, people were traveling in buses and cars, but as transportation started getting congested with bumper-to-bumper traffic, many people who had driven, left their cars and walked to the location.