New York (AFP)

Three days in the slush erected as a symbol of the generation "Peace and love": the Woodstock festival has marked the history of music and has entered the legend, the myths that surround it is now confused with reality.

In 1969, the American society was torn apart by protests against the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy a year earlier. As a cure for anger, Woodstock promises "three days of peace and music".

Some of the artists featured in the festival have engaged with the struggles that are shaking the country, like Country Joe and The Fish and its hymn to peace in Vietnam "One, two, three, why are we fighting?"

But for some, it is difficult to qualify the festival as "politics".

"For black power and anti-war activists, Woodstock was a joke," said Martha Bayles, culture and music specialist at Boston University, AFP.

- "Not a revolution" -

In the minds of these activists "it was nothing but a bunch of drugged hippies who were not serious, who did not understand the magnitude of the situation," she analyzes.

The artist probably the most engaged of the festival, Joan Baez remembers Woodstock as of a "festival of joy".

"These three days of din were important, but it was not a revolution," says the folk singer at the New York Times. "A revolution or even a social change does not happen without the will to take risks," she says, "and the only risk to Woodstock was not to be invited."

Some moments that helped make the festival mythical were only known after the fact. Just like the American national anthem deconstructed and beautifully reinterpreted on the guitar by Jimi Hendrix, hoisted as the symbol of a whole movement but ... missed by many festival-goers, most of whom did not hear very well what was happening on stage.

Fortunately the moment was captured by the cameras for the Oscar-winning documentary "Woodstock", released in 1970.

Suddenly, "the notion of patriotism was broadened," recalls Danny Goldberg, a 19-year-old music journalist at the time of the festival, "some elements of the Woodstock myth have been tied to the peace movement of the time".

- A turning point for music -

The festival has also become legendary for bringing music to the forefront that has - for a moment - brought together Americans from all walks of life, a rock style rooted in folk, blues and gospel.

"Music has federated all this generation, workers, students, soldiers," says Bayles.

And for a long time perceived as a counter-culture, this music has become the dominant culture.

"This has certainly shown to great concert promoters, major record labels and major broadcasters that the audience of what was then called the + underground music + (...) was much wider than what had been perceived so far, "Judge Danny Goldberg.

The soul of Woodstock is also still visible in many festivals and the event can be considered as a pioneer of the culture of "rave parties", these underground electro parties that swarmed in the 1990s, according to Martha Bayles.

"The power of all this was really related to the music and the crowd, this illusion that all had been dragged into a kind of transcendent collective experience."

© 2019 AFP