Bobbi Kelly, who was featured in the iconic photo used as the cover of the Woodstock album, died over the weekend, according to her husband.
“It’s with beyond great sadness that I tell my FB family and friends, that after 54 years of life together, of the death of my beautiful wife, Bobbi, last night surrounded by her family,” Nick Ercoline posted on Facebook Saturday. “She lived her life well, and left this world in a much better place. If you knew her, you loved her. She lived by her saying, ‘Be kind’.”
“She didn’t deserve this past year’s nightmare, but she isn’t suffering from the physical pain anymore and that brings some comfort to us,” he wrote.
Nick Ercoline and Bobbi Kelly were 20-year-old sweethearts when photographer Burke Uzzle snapped a shot of the couple holding each other wrapped up in a blanket at the three-day festival.
Behind a pair of thick yellow sunglasses, Bobbi gazes towards the camera.
The photo became the cover of 1970’s “Woodstock: Music from the Original Soundtrack and More” — a triple vinyl LP in May 1970 to accompany a concert film of the festival.
The couple met in 1969 while Nick was bartending at Dino’s Bar and Grill in Middletown, NY, Bobbi and Nick told The Post in 2019.
They started dating in May — just months ahead of Woodstock, which took place from Aug. 15 to 18.
After making a last-minute decision to go to the festival, they packed up their 1965 Chevrolet Impala station wagon, which they eventually abandoned about four or five miles from the concert site.
As they walked the rest of the way, Bobbi found the blanket.
“As we were walking in, I picked up the blanket because I thought we needed something to sit on,” said Bobbi. “It was just discarded, so I scarfed it up and that’s where the pink blanket came from.”
They staked out a spot on the top of a hill, where the Uzzle photographed the couple.
From the hillside the sound was incredible, they said.
Bobbi and Nick got engaged on Christmas Eve 1970 and married on Aug. 27, 1971 — just days after the second anniversary of Woodstock — at St. Paul’s Catholic Church in Bullville, NY.
They went on to raise a family with two sons: Matthew, born in 1979, and Luke, arriving in 1981.
They later learned that they were on the album cover while listening to it with a friend.
It wasn’t until the 20th anniversary of Woodstock, in 1989, that Nick and Bobbi were publicly identified as the couple in the iconic photo that they now proudly display in their kitchen.
Bobbi told The Post they want their photo to inspire a message of peace, love and hope in generations to come.
“I just hope that when folks look at that picture and they think of what a chaotic, troubled world we have right now, [they will feel] that there’s always hope,” she said. “Always. No matter how bad it seems to be, you gotta have hope.”
Bobbi had been in hospice and made her husband promise her three things before she died, Nick said: “1. No more hospitals 2. Home is where she will stay 3. When her time comes for her passing, that I would hold her close.”
“I was able to accomplish these 3 promises as my sweet Bobbi passed from this world while I held her close with our sons next to us,” Nick wrote in a heartbreaking follow-up post.