I can't remember who coined the term, or when I first heard it, but "the great folk scare" refers to that period in pop music history immediately before Bob Dylan went electric. There were all kinds of folk scenes in places like Greenwich Village and Cambridge, Mass. where the performers were writing their own material, much of it topical in nature (as opposed to doing traditional songs). People like Phil Ochs, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Tom Paxton, Joan Baez, Richard & Mimi Farina, Dave Von Ronk, Eric Schmidt, not to mention Dylan and a host of others were just getting started and no doubt feeding off one another for inspiration. One of my favorites from that period is Eric Andersen, who as it happens hails from Western New York. Here he is singing one of his best songs at a festival in Toronto in 1970 (at Exhibition Stadium-- a terrible place to watch a baseball game, by the way, but maybe not so bad for music):
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