Club Passim

Club Passim is an American folk music club in the Harvard Square area of Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was opened by Joyce Kalina (now Chopra) and Paula Kelley in 1958, when it was known as Club 47 (based on its then address, 47 Mount Auburn Street, also in Cambridge; it moved to its present location on Palmer Street in 1963), and changed its name to simply Passim in 1969. "Passim" in the name is pronounced with the accent on the second syllable and as if that were "seem"; it derives from (usually pronounced differently), commonly found in footnotes. It adopted the present name in 1994; a combination of the earlier two names. At its inception, it was mainly a jazz and blues club, but soon branched out to include ethnic folk, then singer/songwriter folk.

Artists who have performed there include Joan Baez, Shawn Colvin, Bob Dylan, Tom Rush, Joni Mitchell, Suzanne Vega, Muddy Waters, Jimmy Buffett and many others.

In the 1960s, the club (when known as Club 47) played a role in the rise of folk-rock music, when it began to book folk/rock bands whose music was unrelated to traditional folk, such as the Lovin' Spoonful. The club's importance to the 1960s Cambridge folk scene is documented extensively in Eric Von Schmidt's Baby, Let Me Follow You Down: The Illustrated Story of the Cambridge Folk Years. Scott Alarik described Club 47 as being "the hangout of choice for the new folkies" during that time.

Today there is a Passim School of Music and Culture for Kids program. The School of Music offers workshops and classes to teens and adults.

Joan Baez described to Rolling Stone's Kurt Loder how she began performing at Club 47 in 1958 as a largely unknown Boston University student, playing on Tuesday nights as a means of providing entertainment because the jazz musicians who played there had Tuesday nights off; she would continue to perform regularly there through the early 1960s.

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