Week 29 of music1967.com is up! Joni, Leonard, Arlo and Dylan

I know, you’re positively GIDDY at the prospect of another week of music1967.com arriving!

You should be, this was an interesting one. The main event was The Newport Folk Festival, which ended on the first day of this week, Sunday, July 16.

Newport was established in 1959, but it wasn’t until 1965, when Dylan famously went electric, that it started to mean something beyond the folk movement. This year, it featured the debuts of two songwriters who would be giants over the subsequent years – and will continue to be for many more to come.

Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen were both Canadians whose songs were already being covered by dominant folk diva Judy Collins and other established folkies, but they were still relatively new performers to Americans. Cohen hadn’t performed much at all, though Mitchell was already a veteran player.

But they came together at Newport, and music was never the same. We see that a lot in 1967, don’t we? Oh, and Arlo Guthrie debuted a new ditty he’d been putting together over the past year, and it was perhaps the biggest hit to come out of the festival: He would record “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” on the strength of his performance at Newport, and it would appear on vinyl in October.

Plus: The Incredible String Band, Al Stewart and Cat Stevens!

What a year! I’m putting up a week every week, matching that week in 1967, all through 2020.

Find out more about what Elvis Presley was doing in 1967 – along with – during week nine, February 26-March 4.

Or check out Week 17: April 23-29, the week that Muhammad Ali and Martin Luther King, Jr. made history; and a young Bob Marley settled back in in Jamaica after a sojourn driving a fork lift in Delaware!

Or there was Week 23, June 4-10, back out in Los Angeles, where area bands were preparing to head north to battle their friendly foes in San Francisco at the Monterey Pop Festival.

There’s a new week of 1967 appearing every Thursday through 2020. You won’t even BELIEVE the things you didn’t know about this crucial year in the development of popular music.