glimpses of the berkeley folk music festival, summer 1968.

Great, tantalizing TV news footage of the 1968 Berkeley Folk Music Festival from the San Fransisco State University’s Bay Area Television Archives. Bluegrass, casual pickin’, a choir singing, and the audience out in the sun out on the Cal campus’s Sproul Plaza.

This was the year that there were major protests going on just down the street on Telegraph Avenue. It’s amazing the festival was held at all, but it went off peacefully.

KTVU News footage from July 4th 1968 featuring scenes from a Bluegrass and Folk music festival at UC Berkeley. Includes views of performers playing to large crowds.

If anyone ever locates copies of the KQED “Summer Sampler” show, it contains much more footage of the Berkeley Folk Music Festival from 1967, 1968, and 1970. Please contact me if you have any leads on where this footage might be!