The Historical Difference Between Beatniks and Hippies

     The beatnik movement started around the year I was born, 1961.  My mother's former husband was the first beatnik my father had ever met, Bud Sife, who is still alive today.
     That was actually in the fifties, before my parents were married, and my brother born in '59, so I guess I am contradicting myself, but I guess historically, Buddy was ahead of his time, in that way.  My father describes his way of speaking, in his own autobiography, Journey Out of Darkness, his life story of encroaching blindness due to retinitis pigmentosa, his family, leading to meeting Meher Baba, in India, in 1965, with my mother, one year after she had met Baba alone.
     Some of my father's autobiography has been published in Glow Magazine, edited by Narsherwan.  
     Folk music was a big part of the hippie movement.  WWII was an instigator for writers such as Allen Ginsberg.  And, I believe that, although he wants to be a part of the hippie movement, which really started around 1965, I think Leonard Cohen is more from the beatnik movement, because of his poetry, such as his published book of poems, Flowers for Hitler, obviously a sardonic statement, one of the poems it is named for, his age considered as well.
     Truly, folk music began with slavery, spirituals, which kept the slaves going in adversity.
     When Viet Nam started, and all through it, the hippies started a protest movement, including folk songs by singers, such as Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and Pete Seiger.  Arlo Guthry was from an earlier time.  Joe Hill, born in Sweden in the late 1800's would fit into his category of union protest, etc., similar, but not the same as the type of music in Oh Brother Where Art Thou.  
     Included in the folk movement, were such singers as Judy Collins, The Seekers, Peter, Paul and Mary, Harry Bellafonte, and others.
     In the '70's, pop stars, folk musicians like Joni Mitchel, who later became progressive and jazzy, by around '77 with Hissing on Summer Lawns, James Taylor, Carol King, Joan Armatrading, similar a bit to the nineties folk singer, who is still popular, Tracy Chapman, in style, Cat Stevens, Jackson Browne, etc., emerged on the scene.
     I think that the bohemian movement, like in the '20's in Paris, with Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, Picasso, really started the seeds to the beatnik culture, which was like a renaissance of that, in a way, I think.  
     I find this all quite interesting, and so I researched some of the history.  Sometimes I wish I had lived back in another time, because parts of my consciousness are so effected by it, having been born at the beginning, or one of the beginnings.