The Cambridge Folk Festival is an annual music festival held on the site of Cherry Hinton Hall in Cherry Hinton, one of the villages subsumed by the city of Cambridge, England. The festival is renowned for its eclectic mix of music and a wide definition of what might be considered folk.
It occurs over a long weekend in summer at Cherry Hinton Hall. The festival has become very popular and tickets sell out quickly.
Its current title sponsor is BBC Radio 2 where it is broadcast live, while highlights are recorded and shown later on the digital television channel BBC Four. In autumn 1964 Cambridge City Council, England, decided to hold a music festival the next summer and asked Ken Woollard, a local firefighter and socialist political activist, to help organise it. Woollard had been inspired by a documentary, Jazz On A Summer’s Day, about the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. The first Festival sold 1400 tickets and almost broke even. Squeezed in as a late addition to the bill was a young Paul Simon who had just released I Am A Rock.
The festival's popularity quickly grew. Woollard continued as Festival organiser and artistic director up until his death in 1993. It is now run by Cambridge City Council Arts & Entertainments, together with over two hundred event staff.
