Betsy Siggins

Club 47 Staff Member and Founding Member of NEFMA

Betsy Siggins 1: The folk/bohemian lifestyle was just springing up all over Boston campuses and Cambridge campuses. It was new, it was exciting, it was different, it was out of the fifties. Most artistic people found the fifties very dull and very by the book. People with radical ideas didn’t have much of a place. Politically there had been a lot of people arguing for peace, and they still are. That was probably the touchstone for many of us, was that we discovered early that people could indeed protest in a safe environment. They could say what they felt about war and civil rights and women’s rights. A lot of things just coalesced in the early sixties, and we were here. The music scene just seemed to naturally spring up in very small coffee houses.