Background
He grew up living in the San Francisco Bay Area cities of Belvedere, Brentwood and Berkeley, moving several times as his father was a school principal.
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Barry Olivier
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He moved to Berkeley in 1947 as a teenager. Olivier lived in Berkeley until the early 1980"s, and since then has lived in Oakland, California. Olivier has been part of the Berkeley folk music scene since the 1950s. He was influenced by folk revivalists such as Burl Ives, Carl Sandburg, and John Jacob Niles, who he saw perform on campus at California
Beginning in 1956 he hosted “The Midnight Special” on KPFA radio.
He started a music instrument shop in Berkeley, The Barrel Folk Music Center, to serve the growing folk music community during the mid-1950s. In 1958, Olivier, as a former student of University of California Berkeley envisioned and created The Berkeley Folk Festival which became an annual event, directed and produced by Olivier, until 1970.
In 1974, Olivier"s archive of folk festival materials was acquired by Northwestern University (ibid). This festival was the subject of history and American studies professor Michael J. Kramer’s research seminar “Digitizing Folk Music History: The Berkeley Folk Festival.” In May 2011, he spoke at Northwestern about his experience during the 60"s (ibid).
He taught a young boy from El Cerrito California named John Fogerty his first guitar lessons (ibid), and helped Kate Wolf perfect her guitar playing technique.
He is the father of five children. Joan Baez concert handbill, 16 April 1967 (Barry Olivier, Producer).
