The Rather Magnificent Bert Sommer: Woodstock’s Lost Treasure

I first visited the Museum at Bethel Woods—better known as the Woodstock Museum—on a frigid day that hung from 2017 by an icicle. The 50th anniversary would be in a couple of years and I wanted to beat the crowds (and to see what I’d missed). I recalled the music and the media aftermath, all burned into the collective memory of kids like me growing up in the ’60s. Sure, we knew all about Woodstock . . . or did we? And that’s how I discovered Bert Sommer.

I entered his name in the Google search bar. A song titled “Jennifer” was all that popped up, a three-minute clip on YouTube that had managed to survive his omission from both the 1970 Woodstock documentary and its soundtrack. Hair billowing, the androgynous boy smiles and ducks under the whirring blades of a helicopter that has just delivered him to the stage site. Then camera zooms in on his closed eyes while he strums an acoustic guitar.

Nice, I thought, a sweetly sincere tune from an adorable hippie right out of central casting. Vocally, however, what came next was a full-throttle grip and release.

Hitting replay again and again, I couldn’t shake a feeling of astral connection. Why wasn’t he a Woodstock legend? Where was he now? I wanted to piece together who Bert Sommer was—and what had happened.

And so I did.