Denise Sullivan

“For some odd reason, I know everybody,” says Richie Havens. Whether it was destiny or a cosmic hiccup, the musical climax of the ’60s was an auspicious day for Havens when an unplanned three-hour set opening the Woodstock Festival opened his doorway to worldwide recognition. “We landed, they chased me, I went on,” he explains. And yet, even if things hadn’t gone down that way, Havens would still have made his mark on rock history as a graduate of the original Greenwich Village folk scene, as a writer and interpreter of substantive songs, and as the third point in the magic triangle that connects Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix.

“I gave him the words to that,” says Havens, speaking of Hendrix and “All Along the Watchtower”, the song Havens still uses to open all his shows. The first song Havens ever covered by Dylan was “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”; he’s since reworked “If Not For You”, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”, “Lay Lady Lay”, “Maggie’s Farm”, “The Times They Are A-Changin’”, and, most recently, “Tombstone Blues” for the surreal biopic I’m Not There in which he also appeared. As for Hendrix, Havens first witnessed him in action in an uptown club and was so impressed, he hipped him to the Village scene. “I did share that with him—that he didn’t need to be a studio musician, at the whim of everyone else—that he could be in his own band… that’s how we started out knowing each other.”

The last time Havens saw Hendrix was at the second Isle of Wight Festival; the pair had planned to meet in London soon after but Hendrix never made it. “He was a very shy person, quiet person, until he got on stage; then he grew two feet tall,” Havens continues. “He created himself and this showed when he walked up on that stage, how powerful it was and how necessary it was… he loved Bob Dylan’s songs too.”

Beatnik Beginnings

With his ears that catch the rhythm of words and a heart that stays constantly tuned to the station of brotherly love, Havens is a fellow traveler for freethinking ’60s grads and a father figure to those who wish they could’ve been there. As someone who falls in the gap, I can be easily mesmerized by stories of Allen Ginsberg, Hendrix, Dylan, and Woodstock among other things, and so I was willing to take the leap into Havens’ world. Like a new age beatnik who broadcasts the subterranean news through his songs, poems, artwork, and stories that reach across generations (his latest album is No One Left to Crown), Havens fits Jack Kerouac’s description of Beats as “characters of a special spirituality.” A self-proclaimed “song singer” and “all-around expressionist,” he was not only present, but he participated in the cultural shift that began with the Beats and carried over into a mass movement in the ’60s. And yet for Havens, the decade was just the staging ground for the bigger change that’s going to come, the one he says is taking place right now: He calls this phenomenon humanity’s becoming. “I’m blessed to see that we’re really just beginning on what it was we were supposed to be working at, in order to bring about the connection of all of us to each other,” he says.

Back in 1958, when Richie Havens was a teenage doo-wop singer in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, the kids there called him a beatnik. Not knowing for sure what that meant, he took a train with a friend to Greenwich Village to see what he could find out.

“We found out these guys in the neighborhood were talking about poets, and what they might’ve thought was derogatory became a very positive thing to us,” says Havens. It wasn’t long before he was reading his own poems in Village coffeehouses. “We’d sit at a table with our little books and Ginsberg would say, ‘What’s in those books? Get up there and read them!’ That’s how it began for me.

“A lot of people say, ‘What did we do? We didn’t do much.’ Oh yes we did,” he says, in answer to the cynics. “That which was a part of us was connecting up with what we were becoming at that point. And so it was wonderful to see changes. We made an atmosphere. That’s what we’re doing now. Backgrounds and atmosphere. Oh, that’s a good title! Backgrounds and atmosphere.”

Finding work in the Village as a portrait artist, he also discovered folk music in the coffeehouses and began to spend more and more nights in them, arriving later and later to the painting gig, while moving further away from his Bed-Stuy roots. He might crash in the city with singing pals like Little Anthony and the Imperials, but doo wop was no longer compelling to him, nor was the Brooklyn he knew as he watched his neighborhood and old pals take directions he wasn’t going. And so he left doo wop and a potential life in “show biz,” and became a part of what he calls the “communication business,” joining up with the folk scene. “I gave up show biz when I found a different song to sing, like Freddie Neil’s song to ‘Tear Down the Walls.’ In 1959? I’m going, ‘wow.’”

“The music’s in the air, where every man is free,” sang Fred Neil on “Tear Down the Walls”, one of his early-period folk songs. “When I think about it, that’s a heck of a time, when almost nobody was asking those kinds of things or projecting them,” says Havens.

“And Dino Valenti, ‘Love is but a song we sing, and fear’s the way we die,’” he sings, quoting “Get Together.” “He wrote it in 1958! We were awakening by these songs… I couldn’t wait for them to write another song so I could sing it from the audience with them.” Havens took to singing-along, especially while Fred Neil performed, “in harmony no less,” while Neil, who had a reputation as friend-to-the-new-folkie, advised him to get a guitar and learn his own. Three days later, Havens returned to the Village and began to perform six nights a week for the next six years.

“I thought it was time for my friends to hear something more than what we were relegated to do,” he says, referring to the diminishing options for his street corner pals. Havens’ parents were working people; his paternal grandfather was a Blackfoot Indian who traveled east with Buffalo Bill Cody and his Wild West Show. His maternal grandmother was a Caribbean Islander from Great Britain, “born on Christmas Day,” who helped raise him while his parents worked. He recalls one day, as she hung laundry on the line in the backyard, she asked him what he wanted to do with his life. “I said, ‘I want to meet everyone in the whole world.’ I was about five. I’d sit outside and look at the moon in daylight all the time… I’d make a circle with my hands, like a big open eye, and just cut out everything but the clouds going by… I was always fascinated to be a part of this becoming. I don’t think there was any negative feeling I could have.”

There were other teachers: He credits singer and activist Nina Simone and writer and activist James Baldwin as forces in creating an audience for a new brand of socially conscious black expression. He was invited to tour with Simone in 1963—although as they were literally traveling down the road together they overhead on the radio that President Kennedy had been shot. “It was one of the saddest days of my life and of course the tour was over. From that moment on there was a new depth in everything I sang or interpreted,” he wrote in his 1999 autobiography, They Can’t Hide Us Anymore.