3 Underground Artists That Left The Monterey Folk Festival As Stars

On this day 61 years ago, the Monterey Folk Festival was turning relatively underground artists into musical stars seemingly overnight. Held at the Monterey County Fairgrounds in southern California, the festival laid the groundwork for the Monterey International Pop Festival of 1967, which played a pivotal role in the creative counterculture movement.

However, the Monterey festival organizers did more than spur the Summer of Love (which, to their credit, was no small feat). They also facilitated one of the most historic changing of the guards the musical realm has ever seen. Indeed, the star-studded folk lineup included well-established acts like Doc Watson, The Andrews Sisters, and The Weavers.

But it also included artists who, at the time, were still waiting for their big break. For these lucky musicians, the Monterey Folk Festival of 1963 got them one step closer.

Bob Dylan

The Monterey Folk Festival marked the moody troubadour’s first-ever West Coast appearance after years of writing and cutting his teeth in the Midwest and on the East Coast. Bob Dylan performed a short, four-song set, which featured “Masters of War, “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” “Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues,” and “With God On Our Side.” 

The last of the four tracks was a duet with Dylan’s then-partner and musical collaborator, Joan Baez, who introduced the rising songwriter as “a young man you’re going to hear more of” (via Shorpy). How true she was—Dylan’s sophomore album ‘The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan’ was released nine days after the festival, and the rest is musical history.

Janis Joplin

Janis Joplin attended the Monterey Folk Festival as a concertgoer, not a performer. However, the singer had already developed a reputation in the San Francisco scene for her inimitable, powerful voice. Linda Gottfried, Joplin’s friend and roommate, told biographer Alice Echols that other female performers eventually stopped getting up to sing whenever Joplin arrived at any of the various Bay Area musical hootenannies. 

The folk festival was no different. “She created something of a stir,” Echols’ wrote in Scars of Sweet Paradise. “She did sing at the informal hoots on the second stage. Janis won three hootenanny contests there and tickets to the shows on the major stage.” Jae Whitaker, a contemporary of Joplin’s, said, “Everybody just loved her. She won every damn time she got up there and sang. They just went f***ing wild. I started paying attention.”

A Pre-Grateful Dead Jerry Garcia

Before Jerry Garcia became the driving musical star behind the Grateful Dead, he was performing in a bluegrass outfit that played the Monterey Folk Festival’s band contest. The Wildwood Boys included Garcia on banjo, Robert Hunter on bass, David Nelson on guitar, and Ken Frankel on fiddle. A testament to their humble beginnings, the ensemble left before the event organizers announced the contest winner, assuming it wouldn’t be them.

It was. “We were all sitting together watching a show when the MC announced that we were the winners of the band contest,” Frankel later recalled (via Record Mecca). “We were, ‘What? Us? Quick, where are our instruments? Does anybody have a bass Bob can borrow?’” Garcia had won second place in a banjo competition earlier that day. Four years later, Garcia’s psychedelic jam band performed at the Monterey International Pop Festival. Two years after that, they were at Woodstock.

Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images