Saying Goodbye To One Of The Greatest Folk Artists From The Woodstock Generation

A Brief from Niagara At Large publisher Doug Draper

“Freedom, Freedom, Freedom …”

He belted out that word so passionately, with that ever-so-rich tenor voice of his,that you swear you could hear it ringing out across every hill and valley on the continent.

Richie Havens opening the legendary Woodstock festival.

It was a word Richie Havens made a refrain for the ages in his revved up take on an old gospel song – ‘Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child’ – as he opened the now legendary Woodstock Festival with a set that left him with sweat soaking the shirt on his back.

The ‘Woodstock Nation’, as Sixties hippie leaders like Abbie Hoffman took to calling music festival/makeshift community that came together, half a million strong, in the Catskills Mountains  of New York State in August of 1969, has lost another one of its great ones with the death of Richie Havens this April 22, at age 72 from a sudden heart attack.

Richie Havens was another of those young musicians – among them Bob Dylan – who was drawn to Greenwich Village in Manhattan in the late 1950s and early 1960s to build on a folk legacy of Woody Guthrie that was all about creating music that called for peace, tolerance and a better planet.

Richie Havens in full thrust as a folk singer and messanger for our times.

I was fortunate enough to finally see him in performance with some friends in the 1980s at the Tralf club in Buffalo, New York and we were all sweating with an exhilarance for what he put out there by the end of his show.

Richie Havens wasn’t much of a writer of songs, but he was a great interpreter, most notably on George Harrison’s ‘Here Comes the Sun’, which he made a hit of his own, and Jackson Browne’s ‘Lives In The Balance’ where, as much as it may be hard to match Jackson Browne on one of his tunes, Richie smoked him on that one if you are lucky enough to have or hear Richie’s best version of that song, that just about says it all about the military/industrial complex.

One piece that Richie Havens did participate in the writing of and which he performed at Woodstock, if you have ever seen the film of that concert, is a moving anti-war song called ‘Handsome Johnny’.

I will leave you with some of the final lyrics from that song and say rest in peace to a great friend of this earth, Richie Havens.

“Hey, what’s the use of singing this song
Some of you are not even listening
Tell me what it is we’ve got to do, wait for our fields to start glistening
Hey, wait for the bullets to start whistling

Hey, here comes a hydrogen bomb and here comes a guided missile
Here comes a hydrogen bomb, I can almost hear its whistle
I can almost hear its whistle.”

To hear the song Handsome Johnny, as Richie Havens performed it at the Woodstock concert, click on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viqe5AE4ONc .

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