Jimmyt, coffeehouses were probably the most stable venues for folk music in the late Fifties and early Sixties, but I don't agree that the pop-folk groups had all that much to do with coffeehouses or many other venues. I had heard of coffeehouses in the Bay Area in the early Fifties. Rolf Cahn started a place called "The Blind Lemon" in Berkeley early on, where he sang, along with Barbara Dane, Jo Mapes, and others. There was "The Place," "The Brighton Express," and a couple of other places in San Francisco. This was well before the Kingston Trio got started. And there were places in Boston and Greenwich Village which had been operating long before that. People like Ed McCurdy, whom I first heard of in 1954, were singing in various clubs and coffeehouses around New York. The places were already there, a small number of very good singers were already there, and the audiences were already there. It was different from the usual fare, and audiences were really hungry for this sort of thing.

In Seattle, the first coffeehouse was the "Café Encore," opened by a guy from New York who had come to Seattle to open an antique store, but when he found there were no coffeehouses here, he started one. Several singers, including me, who's interest had been initiated by Burl Ives, Susan Reed, Richard Dyer-Bennet, and the Weavers; (all pre-Kingston Trio), dropped in and sang there. The Café Encore was so successful that Bob Clark, who owned the Guild 45th Theater (specializing in foreign films), wanted a piece of the action and opened the second coffeehouse in Seattle: "The Place Next Door." That was probably the biggest and nicest coffeehouse in town. On weekends, people lined up around the block to get in.

Pop-folk groups had little or nothing to do with this. The coffeehouse / folk singer connection had been established for at least a decade by the time the Kingston Trio had its first big hit in 1958. What they did was hop on their surfboards and ride a wave that was already cresting. With Tom Dooley as a hit song, suddenly folk music was big money. Hit Parade. Radio. Juke boxes. Television. ABC Hootenanny. New coffeehouses everywhere. New folk trios 'til hell won't have it, all learning from each other's records or writing their own "folk songs." Like most popular fads, it flared like a meteor and faded out. The afterglow still exists (witness this thread). But the main stream of folk music was there long before, perturbed a bit in the Sixties by something akin to Greshams Law. But that main stream, if it's healthy, which I think it is, will keep right on going.

Don Firth