Billy Faier, one of the co-founders of the Woodstock Folk Festival, came to Woodstock as a 14-year-old in 1945. According to Eleanor Walden, Billy was a very independent teenager. She remembers visiting his apartment in the mid-1940s in Greenwich Village and listening to folk and blues records. One time in 1946, she and Billy came up to Woodstock for the weekend. Faier loved Woodstock. When he was growing up in Brooklyn, he recalls on his website, he was patronized, ignored, and abused by so-called schoolmates. Upon relocating to Woodstock, he attended Kingston High School and found he was treated much the same. However, when he moved out and about in the Woodstock community, he encountered a group of people who accepted him. These were the artists of the Woodstock Art Colony.
During the 1950s, Faier became proficient on the five-string banjo. He recorded a series of albums, including two for the Riverside label and another on Electra. In 1959 he appeared at the Newport Folk Festival. By 1962 Billy was an accomplished and connected folk music veteran, so it makes sense that he co-founded the Woodstock Folk Festival, which occurred that year. After the festival, Bernard and Mary Lou Paturel hired him as a talent booker for Café Espresso.