Editing New York City Music Scene (section)

===Folk Revival and the Greenwich Village Scene (1950s–1960s)===

Greenwich Village in Lower Manhattan became the center of America's folk music revival in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Coffeehouses and small clubs — including Café Wha?, the Gaslight Café, and Gerde's Folk City — hosted a community of singer-songwriters and traditional musicians who drew on American roots music, labor songs, and the British Isles ballad tradition. The Village scene was explicitly political, deeply intertwined with the civil rights movement and the broader American left.

Bob Dylan arrived in New York from Minnesota in January 1961 and rapidly became the dominant figure of the scene, his early performances at Gerde's Folk City attracting the attention of Columbia Records producer John Hammond, who signed him within months. Peter, Paul and Mary, Phil Ochs, Joan Baez, and Dave Van Ronk were among the other significant figures of the Village folk scene. Dylan's pivot to electric rock in 1965 — previewed at the Newport Folk Festival and consolidated on albums recorded in New York — was among the most consequential creative decisions in the history of popular music.

The Village remained a creative hub through the late 1960s and into the 1970s, hosting early performances by artists as diverse as Jimi Hendrix, who lived in the neighborhood, and the Velvet Underground, whose drone-based art rock represented a very different strand of the downtown avant-garde.