A three-day festival on Max Yasgur's farm draws half a million and expands the spirit of a generation. (Originally published Sept. 20, 1969.)

BETHEL, N. Y., Aug. 15 -A crowd estimated at more than 200,000 poured into this Catskill Mountain hamlet today for a three-day rock and folk music festival, creating massive traffic jams and a potentially serious security problem.

Most of the hip, swinging youngsters heard the music on stage only as a distant rumble. It was almost impossible for them to tell who was performing and probably only half the crowd could hear a note. Yet they stayed by the thousands, often standing ankle-deep in mud.

Waves of weary youngsters streamed away from the Woodstock Music and Art Fair last night and early today as security officials reported at least two deaths and 4,000 people treated for injuries, illness and adverse drug reactions over the festival's three-day period.

The counterculture’s biggest bash was sponsored by four very different, and very young, men: John Roberts, Joel Rosenman, Artie Kornfeld and Michael Lang. The oldest of the four was 26. John Roberts supplied the money. He was heir to a drugstore and toothpaste manufacturing fortune. He had seen exactly one rock concert, by the Beach Boys.

“You can all go pound salt up your ass, because come August 15, we’re going to have a festival!”

A half-century after a mass of humanity converged on a farm in Bethel, N.Y. for three days of peace and music, musicians and concert-goers recall a unique moment for their generation

A too-small soundsystem, combined with oppressive physical conditions, made it difficult for many at Woodstock to focus on the music.

The crowd gave the newcomer a standing ovation as announcer John Morris declared him "the rather magnificent Bert Sommer." When asked about his standing ovation in the years after Woodstock, Sommer would jokingly brush it off by implying that the crowd was only standing because they were on their way to the bathrooms.

Of all the acts that graced the Woodstock stage that weekend in August 50 years ago, perhaps the most unlikely was Sha Na Na, a group of Columbia University students who previously sang together in the campus a cappella group the Kingsmen and had formed just months before the festival.

A new CD box set, "Woodstock 50: Back to the Garden," captures virtually every minute of audio from the 1969 music festival, from the performers to P.A. announcements and audience interactions.

On the fiftieth anniversary of the festival, a thirty-six-hour boxed set reveals some truths behind baby-boomer myths.

We're shining a light on the women of Woodstock, recounting their performances, the impact they had and the careers they went on to have after the crowds dispersed and the mud began to dry.

Held from August 15 to 18, 1969 on a dairy farm in upstate New York, was arguably the most epic music festival in history. It is cited as one of Rolling Stone's "50 Moments That Changed the History of Rock and Roll," and more importantly, as the "definitive nexus for the larger counterculture generation."

Below you can see an original ad for the Woodstock Music & Art Festival from the August 1969 issue of Ramparts Magazine and it’s riddled with bad information including the very location of the festival itself right around a month before the whole thing was supposed to go down.

The Woodstock crowd battled rain, mud, lack of food and inadequate lavatories, but it did not lose its sense of style.

Photography by Henry Diltz, Baron Wolman, Barry Z Levine, Jason Laure, James Shelley and others for iconic Woodstock music fest.

Most people were pleased in the summer of 1969 at how quickly the debris was cleared away following that summer's Woodstock Music and Arts Festival in upstate New York. When half a million people descend on a single, 600-acre farm in the midst of a hot, rainy, muddy August, you can expect a mess.

Country Joe McDonald, Greil Marcus, David Fricke on why the musical event continues to inspire generations 50 years later.

Vintage footage of Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, and Janis Joplin playing regional pop festivals that weren’t Woodstock.

The Harlem Cultural Festival attracted everyone from Stevie Wonder and Nina Simone to RFK and Jesse Jackson, but quickly faded into obscurity. Fifty years later, a rediscovery is finally underway.

Fifty years ago this weekend, some of the biggest names in rock gathered at Wisconsin State Fair Park for a three-day music festival.

The concert was the moment when the idealism of the 1960s counterculture collided with the darkness of human nature.

"I started filming it as if it were a war zone," director Michael Wadleigh says about the iconic movie that documented the 1969 Woodstock music festival.

The monumental music festival held 50 years ago, attended by 400,000 people, wasn't a summation of the counterculture movement in the 1960s, but rather a harbinger of '70s commercialism.

Fifty years ago, reporter Sara Davidson covered Woodstock in all it messy, muddy glory. But the festival, it turned out, was not a harbinger but a beautiful bubble in time.

Rachel Tashjian on Jimi Hendrix, hippie style, and the generation that rejected consumerism.

Business reporter Rick Romell got sick of the mud, missed most of the music but still has a great story from the 1969 festival.

See stories of peace, love and music -- plus traffic, drugs, deaths and more.

Depending on what source you read in 1969, the festival was a beatific good time, a haven for heavy drug use, or even a chaotic, apocalyptic mess.

Fifty years later, the site of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair is on the National Register of Historic Places. For some who were there, it's a place of pilgrimage and memories.

He may not have been as hip as Jimi Hendrix, but Max Yasgur played as important a role in the original Woodstock, which took place 50 years ago, beginning Aug. 15, 1969.

They delivered stranded performers to the 1969 music festival, and carried sick hippies out.

The Woodstock Music and Art Fair held on Max Yasgur's 600-acre farm was a spectacular accident, an improbable collision of events, energies, and expectations propelled by the promise of rock & roll.

A new documentary explores the original organizers’ ingenuity and naïveté, revealing the exact reason the concert is unreproducible.