In August 1969, hundreds of thousands of people assembled on the grounds of a farm in Upstate New York. After nearly half a century, this festival, billed as the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, still resonates as the quintessential music extravaganza of all time. Similar in theme and form to Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, The Bethel Tales, chronicled by a 20-year-old named Danny Berger, it is a collection of 33 narratives told by a group of concert-goers as part of a story-telling contest to pass the time traveling from Manhattan by Greyhound bus to the Woodstock Festival near White Lake, NY. The tales told by the people on board, a diversified party of professional, blue-collar, secular, and religious individuals, are thought-provoking, humorous, inspirational, bawdy, and, at times, tragic. Their stories offer us not only a wide-ranging look at our culture of the time, but also of what people choose to remember and wish to pass on to others

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