A misspelled name meant photos of one of the musician’s most memorable performances, at Woodstock, were hiding in plain sight for three decades. The

Jim Hendricks? Oh, Jimi Hendrix.

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2024-11-17 21:00:03

A misspelled name meant photos of one of the musician’s most memorable performances, at Woodstock, were hiding in plain sight for three decades.

The Woodstock Music and Art Fair, the multiday festival held on a dairy farm in Bethel, N.Y., in the summer of 1969, has ascended to legendary status. It was a seminal event, attended by hundreds of thousands of people, which brought some of the biggest musical acts of the day to the stage: the Grateful Dead. Creedence Clearwater Revival. Janis Joplin. The Who.

Much of The New York Times’s photography coverage of Woodstock was focused on the spectacle — the throngs of festivalgoers; scenes of sweat- and mud-soaked revelry. Surprisingly, there was a dearth of images of the musicians who performed.

That year, an employee of the Morgue, The New York Times’s physical archives library, was searching through the file on Woodstock, which contains more than 100 prints and 80 contact sheets — collections of photos printed together in a grid — amounting to some 2,000 images, when he found one contact sheet from a roll of film taken by Larry C. Morris, a Times photographer.

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