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.
And … Jim Hendricks?
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.
But The Times had captured more history than it realized, something the newspaper would not discover until 1999.
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.
The back of the sheet included Morris’s notes: “Early AM, Jim Hendricks, guitarist.” His photos had, of course, actually depicted Jimi Hendrix, one of Woodstock’s headlining acts and the artist who closed out the festival — after much of the crowd had gone home.
The misspelling meant the images didn’t get printed and filed into the musician’s own folder, and the shots of the performance were hidden in plain sight for three decades among thousands of other images.
Hendrix’s unconventional rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Woodstock that year remains one of the most famous versions of the country’s national anthem, turning a patriotic work into what is widely considered a protest of the Vietnam War. He died a year later, at age 27.
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