When Bob Dylan strode onto the stage at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25, 1965, strapped on an electric guitar and tore into “Maggie’s Farm” with a roaring band behind him, he created one of the most enduring myths in American music.

Dylan went electric. The folk purists revolted. American music would never be the same.

Except that isn’t quite what happened.

Muddy Waters had played electric guitar at the festival a year earlier. And at the 1965 festival, the Chambers Brothers and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band — with Mike Bloomfield and Elvin Bishop on electric guitars — had already brought amplified music to Newport before Dylan took the stage Sunday night.

What made Dylan’s performance revolutionary wasn’t that nobody had plugged in before him.

It was that Dylan had.

“Dylan’s moment is more of a symbolic moment,” Greenport music archivist and film producer Joe Lauro said. “He didn’t pioneer — it wasn’t the first time anything like that ever happened. We use it as a metaphor, because it signifies how things were changing.”

The distinction between the mythology of Newport and what actually happened there runs through Newport & the Great Folk Dream, a highly-acclaimed new 99-minute documentary produced by Lauro and directed by Emmy- and Grammy-winning filmmaker Robert Gordon.

Built entirely from archival material, much of it rarely or never seen, the film immerses viewers in four extraordinary Newport Folk Festivals from 1963 through 1966 — when Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger and Johnny Cash shared a musical universe with Howlin’ Wolf, Mississippi John Hurt, the Staple Singers, Bill Monroe, Doc Watson, John Lee Hooker and scores of traditional performers whose names have largely disappeared from popular memory. The filmmakers worked from more than 80 hours of mostly unseen 16mm negatives, restored in 4K.

After premiering at the Venice Film Festival last year, Newport & the Great Folk Dream has traveled the international film-festival circuit, with screenings from Sydney and Melbourne to documentary and independent-film festivals across the United States.

The film will make its Long Island festival debut Sunday at 5:15 p.m., closing the three-day Long Island Music & Entertainment Hall of Fame Music Documentary Film Festival in Stony Brook, with Lauro participating in the screening.

‘I hounded him’

For Lauro, the film represents something close to the culmination of a lifetime spent chasing American music — listening to it, collecting it, playing it, finding forgotten footage of it and, increasingly, rescuing pieces of its history before they disappear.

His Greenport-based company, Historic Films, is a commercial archive that licenses historical footage to filmmakers and other producers. Lauro has also made documentaries about artists including Howlin’ Wolf, Louis Prima, Fats Domino and the Supremes.

And for years, he had his eye on one particular treasure.

Filmmaker Murray Lerner had shot extensively at Newport between 1963 and 1966, using a fraction of that material for his Oscar-nominated 1967 documentary Festival. Lauro knew Lerner through his archival business and his dealings with Jeff Rosen in Bob Dylan’s camp and others.

Eventually, Lauro learned just how much Newport footage Lerner still possessed.

“There’s like almost 100 hours sitting in storage,” Lauro recalled. “He guarded it like his children. It was in his office, all locked up. No one could get near it unless he knew who you were.”

Lauro began pursuing him.

“I hounded him about allowing me to make a film about it first, and then a little bit later about allowing me to maybe buy it from him,” he said. “This went on for five, six years.”

Around 2020, Lerner finally called.

“All right,” Lauro remembers him saying. “Let’s talk about it.”

Lauro teamed with Shout! Factory and acquired the archive with an ambitious plan: organize and preserve the material, make it available to others, and make the film that Lauro believed was still hiding inside it.

Newport in those years functioned as an extraordinary meeting ground between the commercially successful folk revival and musicians whose work had helped create American popular music but who were largely unknown to the young people buying Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary records.

One was Mississippi John Hurt, the country blues guitarist and singer who recorded 12 sides for OKeh Records in 1928, then largely disappeared from the music business for decades before being tracked down — through one of his songs — in Avalon, Miss., during the folk revival.

The festival could draw young audiences with Dylan or Baez or Cash, Lauro said, then put someone like Hurt in front of them.

“What else were they going to do?” Lauro said with a laugh. “’Okay, there’s another hour before Dylan. Let’s go see this Mississippi John Hurt guy.’”

“And it just exploded. It just gave another life to that music and to those people.”

For Lauro, who collects old 78 rpm records and hosts a radio program devoted to prewar folk, blues, jazz and country music, screening the Lerner archive could be almost overwhelming. He’s also musician himself, playing guitar and singing with the East End roots band the Hoodoo Loungers.

He remembers seeing footage of Bill Monroe paired with the blind North Carolina guitarist Doc Watson at the 1963 festival, performing ‘What Would You Give in Exchange for Your Soul?’, which Bill Monroe and his brother Charlie recorded in 1936.

“It just made the hair on the back of my neck stand up,” Lauro said.

Lauro brought Gordon, a longtime colleague and filmmaker he admired, into the project. Rather than make a conventional historical documentary filled with present-day interviews explaining what happened 60 years ago, they decided the audience should remain inside the period.

“We were going to make it an immersion film,” Lauro said. “We were never going to leave the era.”

When Joan Baez speaks, viewers see the young Baez, not the 85-year-old artist looking back decades later.

“The footage had to tell the story,” Lauro said.

The film archive also captured celebrated musicians at moments in their careers that have largely faded from popular memory.

Lauro was particularly struck by the Staple Singers before drums, bass and the polished soul arrangements that would later make them stars — just Roebuck “Pops” Staples’ guitar and his three daughters’ voices.

“Just them singing raw storefront gospel, just guitar,” Lauro said. “Oh my God.”

Newport, he said, also put musicians and audiences together across racial and cultural boundaries that remained formidable in America in the early 1960s.

“The vision of Pete Seeger and Alan Lomax got all these people and threw them all together,” Lauro said. “Newport really broke the barriers down.”

Even after years spent immersed in the material, Lauro fought to save performances that were nearly lost from the finished film.

One was by the gospel group the Dixie Hummingbirds. Others working on the film argued that the performance didn’t fit the narrative.

“I said, ‘You don’t need it to be in the narrative,’” Lauro recalled. “‘Throw it in there somewhere because the performance itself is so mind-bogglingly great that it can go anywhere.’”

He won. At an early screening, audiences reacted strongly enough that the performance stayed.

Still, there was far more music than could fit into 99 minutes. So the filmmakers found another solution: They turned the closing credits into a seven-minute mini concert.

Among the performances tucked into the credits is Maybelle Carter playing “Wildwood Flower.” Another is Muddy Waters playing acoustic guitar — something Lauro said he had never before seen on film. The original film recording had a problem: Waters’ guitar wasn’t properly miked. The filmmakers eventually located another audio source at the Library of Congress with stronger guitar sound and combined it with the footage.

The result is the kind of musical archaeology that has defined much of Lauro’s career.

When asked how much significant American music history might still be sitting unseen in film cans and private archives, Lauro was upbeat, but realistic.

“Things get discovered every day,” he said. “The problem is having the finances to do something with them.”

“That’s kind of what I have been doing in my career,” he added, “finding stuff like this.”

With Newport & the Great Folk Dream, Lauro got to take one of those discoveries from a dusty film archive to screens around the world. He believes the reason audiences, including people born decades after Newport, still respond to it isn’t particularly complicated.

“There’s an honesty to this music,” he said.

Watching Peter, Paul and Mary in the old footage caused even Lauro to reconsider a group he knew well.

“You see their fire and their passion that doesn’t really come through on the records,” he said. “They were so in tune with each other as musicians and their voices.”

For a few extraordinary years, Lauro believes Newport captured something even larger: stars and unknowns, Black and white musicians, ancient traditions and rapidly changing popular music all occupying the same space.

“For a couple of minutes,” Lauro said, “it was an amazing, amazing — totally amazing —utopia of music.”