After the dust of the Dust Bowl settled down, American folksinger Woody Guthrie moved to New York City and played more for the leftist East Coast intelligentsia than for migrant workers. Among these performances, one of the better documented was an informal concert in a remarkable carriage house in Lenox, Mass. ... July 1950. Alan Lomax, a friend of the Barbers, hosted a concert featuring Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and the Rev. Gary Davis. Among those in attendance was Dan Burley, a piano player and journalist for the Amsterdam News and other African-American newspapers.
We don't know exactly what music was played that night, but it appears that Woody drew on his early years of Oklahoma fiddling, as well as the political songs for which he was better known. The photographs show him engaged in some trick fiddling and playing a guitar with his hand-scrawled signature phrase, "This machine kills fascists."
This is believed to be one of Woody's last performances before Huntington's disease began to affect his behavior and ability to play and sing.
These images survive only as a set of contact sheets.