The Ash Grove arrived at precisely the right moment. The American folk revival was gaining momentum in the late 1950s, driven partly by the same political energy that was animating the civil rights movement — folk music as democratic music, music of the people, music that carried weight. Ed Pearl shared those politics, and the Ash Grove became as much a community as a venue: a place where musicians, activists, students, and curious Angelenos gathered around something that felt both ancient and urgent. Blues musicians, bluegrass pickers, flamenco guitarists, and Tex-Mex accordionists all played a room that seated a few hundred people on folding chairs.

Ry Cooder played his first performance at the Ash Grove in 1963, when he was 16 years old — a debut that launched one of the most adventurous careers in American music. Linda Ronstadt met guitarist Kenny Edwards at the club, and the two went on to form the Stone Poneys together. Chris Hillman and Clarence White — two future members of the Byrds — met at the Ash Grove when both were still teenagers playing bluegrass. Mick Jagger was a frequent visitor during the Rolling Stones' early American tours. The room had a way of putting the right people in the same space at the same moment.

The Ash Grove's left-leaning identity made it a target. It was the 1960s and early 1970s, a time when politics in Los Angeles — and across the country — ran at temperatures that sometimes produced violence. The club was targeted by Cuban exile groups who objected to Ed Pearl's political sympathies and, specifically, to his booking of performers who had played in Cuba. A series of arson fires struck the Ash Grove beginning in 1969. The perpetrators of the 1971 fire were caught and identified as Cuban exiles organized in opposition to the club's programming. The final fire, in 1973, destroyed the building for good, ending 15 years of programming. The Improv comedy club opened in the former space in 1974.

More than 3,000 hours of recordings were made at the Ash Grove over the course of its operation — audio documents of performances by artists who were just beginning and artists who were at the peak of their powers. Many of those recordings survived the arson and have been preserved by archives and researchers, representing one of the most significant collections of American folk, blues, and roots music from the era. The tapes capture a room that existed before the musicians in it became famous, before the genres they were playing became commercially packaged, before the folk revival became a commodity. They capture something that was still in the process of being invented.