Folk America, Barbican, London<br>Bookhouse Boys, Night & Day Café, Manchester

The Barbican was decked out like a Greenwich Village café to host a remarkable 1960s line-up

For the Baby Boomer generation, the Folk Revival of the 1960s was a conscious decision, both aesthetic and political, to reconnect with something timeless and true, which was of the people and not of the establishment.

For the offspring of a 1960s folkie, there was no choice in the matter. My dad, whether presenting specialist radio shows, promoting local gigs or playing records at home, not to mention dragging my sullen, ska-loving teenage self to Cambridge and Cropredy, ensured I was indoctrinated at an early age.

I've often wondered what it was all about, that maddening mix of idealism and self-crippling purism. What drove that moment of cross-cultural telepathy when young people in the urban north and rural south of America and over here in the UK donned corduroy caps and cable-knits and excavated their musical roots?

BBC4's Folk America series attempts to explain it, and this Greenwich Village Revisited concert focuses on the New York scene of the early 1960s, on a stage dressed to resemble a Village folk café. The first guest is the most impressive. Stepping out in a fetching fedora with a beautiful red Rickenbacker – nobody shouts "Judas!" – Roger McGuinn opens with Bob Dylan's "My Back Pages" (the song, ironically, in which Dylan distanced himself from his Greenwich Village days), sung in an ethereal soprano which belies his 66 years. Age has been remarkably kind to his angelic larynx, most noticeably on Pete Seeger's "Turn Turn Turn". His guitar skills are equally well-preserved: on "Eight Miles High", one of several Dylan songs he covered with the Byrds, his fingertips are a blur.

An old slave song "Oh Freedom", most famously sung by Odetta on Martin Luther King's 1963 march on Washington, is swollen with significance in this of all weeks. Conversely, cheesy old Irish folk chestnut "Finnegan's Wake", and the traditional "Silver Dagger", as made famous by the bloody awful Joan Baez, remind me why the swing-your-pants end of folk and I will never get along.

Billy Bragg is the perfect compère, his appalling "curry OK?/karaoke" gag notwithstanding. His version of "I Ain't Got No Home" ("Woody Guthrie's comment on the credit crunch") and his own "I Dreamed I Saw Phil Ochs Last Night" stand tall alongside anything from his fellow performers.

Carolyn Hester, another Greenwich Village alumnus, has a lovely Parton-esque country voice, and deploys it on Dylan's "Boots Of Spanish Leather" – Bob Dylan's absent presence casts a huge shadow over an evening dedicated to the scene that spawned him – as well as "House Of The Rising Sun" and "Last Thing On My Mind". Hester is the first to mention Obama, and, after Ed McCurdy's anti-war "Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream", the first to spell out that anti-Vietnam songs have a particular resonance now, a message Bragg rams home with Buffy Sainte-Marie's "Universal Soldier".

Judy Collins is the last act, and, with her Nashville sequins and big silver bouffant, has travelled the farthest from the Greenwich Village aesthetic. She was once, however, iconic enough to the 1960s generation that the Clintons named their daughter after one of her songs ("Chelsea Morning"). Her celebrated soprano, on songs like Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now", is still strong and pure. The tales of Lenny and Dolly, and of eavesdropping at Dylan's door when he wrote "Mr Tambourine Man", however, are more engaging than her singing.

The Bookhouse Boys make music for sinking dark rums and tall tequilas to. The north London nine-piece, crammed on a small stage, offers a sultry and beguiling blend of flamenco, handsome Walker Brothers balladry and Tarantino-esque surf music.

Tousle-haired leader Paul Van Oestren's surname may reveal Dutch heritage, but Hispanic drama is in his blood. With co-singer Catherine Turner, he competes with the screams of the mariachi trumpets and the thumping marshmallow-tipped drumsticks of two drummers, on songs like the superb single "Dead". Gig by gig, the Bookhouse Boys are winning friends everywhere they go. Count me in.