Celebrate the spirit of Woodstock 1969

Woodstock 1969: The Most Historic Music Festival in History

On August 15–18, 1969, an estimated 500,000 people descended on Max Yasgur's 600-acre dairy farm in Bethel, New York, for what its organizers billed as the Aquarian Exposition: Three Days of Peace and Music. Woodstock 1969 stands to this day as the most historic music festival ever staged — not because of the music alone, but because of what that music represented.

Woodstock emerged at the peak of the hippie counterculture movement. With the Vietnam War tearing the country apart, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy still raw, and social upheaval everywhere, half a million young Americans answered with peace, love, and music. What unfolded across those rain-soaked hills was something no organizer had planned: a spontaneous demonstration that the counterculture's ideals were more than rhetoric. No significant violence. No mass arrests. An outpouring of human kindness that stunned a nation watching from the outside.

The Woodstock bands that performed across those four days read like the entire canon of rock history. Jimi Hendrix closed the festival with his legendary performance of the Star-Spangled Banner — widely considered the greatest single performance in rock history. Janis Joplin, The Who, Santana, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Richie Havens, Joan Baez, Joe Cocker, Arlo Guthrie, Crosby Stills Nash & Young — thirty-two acts in all, many performing their finest sets on that muddy hillside in New York.

Woodstock's influence spread far beyond the music itself. The Woodstock film — the Academy Award-winning documentary directed by Michael Wadleigh — became one of the most prolific music documentaries in history, capturing the mud, the chaos, and the spirit for audiences who couldn't be there. The original Woodstock poster, designed by Arnold Skolnick — a dove resting on the neck of a guitar — became one of the most recognized symbols in American cultural history. Woodstock pictures from those days still define the visual language of the entire era.

The ideals of Woodstock 1969 — peace, love, unity, and the transformative power of music — are just as relevant today as they were in that summer of love. This archive exists to preserve them. From in-depth performer biographies and complete setlists to exclusive interviews with the people who made it happen, WoodstockStory.com has been the leading fan authority on Woodstock 1969 for over fifteen years.