Richie Havens, who marshaled a craggy voice, a percussive guitar and a
soulful sensibility to play his way into musical immortality at
Woodstock in 1969, improvising the song “Freedom” on the fly, died on
Monday at his home in Jersey City. He was 72.
The cause was a heart attack, his agent, Tim Drake, said.
Mr. Havens embodied the spirit of the ’60s — espousing peace and love,
hanging out in Greenwich Village and playing gigs from the Isle of Wight
to the Fillmore (both East and West) to Carnegie Hall. He surfaced only
in the mid-1960s, but before the end of the decade many rock musicians
were citing him as an influence. His rendition of “Handsome Johnny”
became an anti-Vietnam War anthem.
He moved beyond his ’60s triumphs to record more than two dozen albums,
act in movies, champion environmental education and perform in 1993 at
the first inauguration of President Bill Clinton. In 2003, the National
Music Council gave him its American Eagle Award for his place in the
nation’s musical heritage. Kidney surgery forced him to stop touring
last year.
For the baby-boomer generation, he will live forever on the stage of the Woodstock festival,
which he had the honor to open because the folk-rock band Sweetwater,
the scheduled opening act, was stuck in traffic. Mr. Havens and his
guitarist and drummer arrived by helicopter. They had been scheduled to
go on fifth.
Mr. Havens started with “Minstrel From Gault” a few minutes after 5 p.m.
on Aug. 15, 1969. He was originally supposed to play four songs, but
other performers were late, so he played on. He later said he thought he
had played for two hours and 45 minutes, but two bands followed him
before sunset, around 8 p.m., so that was impossible.
But Mr. Havens played 10 songs, including Beatles songs. His impassioned
improvisation was pitch perfect for the generation watching him, most
of whom saw it later in a documentary on the festival. His clarion
encore “Freedom” — made up on the spot and interspersed with the spiritual “Motherless Child” — sounded a powerful if wistful note.
“ ‘Freedom’ came from a totally spontaneous place,” Mr. Havens said.
Richard Pierce Havens was born on Jan. 21, 1941, in the
Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, where he grew up. He was the
eldest of nine children. His father made Formica tables for a living and
played piano with various bands. His mother worked for a bookbindery.
He began singing with street-corner doo-wop groups when he was about 12.
At 14 he joined the McCrea Gospel Singers. He was recruited by a street
gang, and he dropped out of high school. He spent the rest of his life
educating himself, and was proud of the results.
In his late teens Mr. Havens migrated to Greenwich Village, where he
wandered the clubs working as a portrait artist. After a few years he
discovered folk music, and he was soon playing several engagements a
night at clubs like Why Not? and the Fat Black Pussycat.
His hands were very large, which made it difficult to play the guitar.
He developed an unorthodox tuning so he could play chord patterns not
possible with conventional tunings. The style was picked up by other
folk and blues singers.
“A person looking at him might think he was just flailing about,” the
guitarist Barry Oliver said in the magazine Guitar Player. “But the way
he flailed about was so musical, and it went perfectly with what he was
portraying. He’s a good example of not having to have to be a
technically perfect guitarist in order to come across.”
Mr. Havens signed with the influential manager Albert Grossman and got a
record deal with the Verve Forecast label. Verve released “Mixed Bag”
in 1967, which featured “Handsome Johnny,” which he wrote with the actor
Louis Gossett Jr.; “Follow,” which became one of his signature songs;
and a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman.”
In 1971, he released the only single that would put him in the Top 20, a soulful rendition of George Harrison’s “Here Comes the Sun.”
His music had a new burst of popularity in the 1980s, and he found
success as a jingle writer and performer for Amtrak, Maxwell House
Coffee and the cotton industry (“The fabric of our lives”). He acted in a
few movies, including “Hearts of Fire” (1987), which starred Bob Dylan.
Mr. Havens devoted considerable energy to educating young people on
ecological issues. In the mid-1970s he founded the Northwind Undersea
Institute, an oceanographic children’s museum on City Island in the
Bronx. He later created the Natural Guard, an environmental organization
for children, to use hands-on methods to teach about the environment.
This seriousness of purpose showed in many areas of his life. “I’m not
in show business,” he said. “I’m in the communications business.”
Carrie Lombardi, Mr. Havens’s publicist, said his family wanted to keep
information about survivors private, but she did say that they include
four daughters and many grandchildren. He was married many years ago.
Mr. Havens played many songs written by Mr. Dylan, and he spent three
days learning his epic “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” A man who heard him
practicing it stopped him on the stairs as he headed for the dressing
room of a nightclub, and told him it was the best he’d ever heard the
song sung.
By DOUGLAS MARTIN New York Times
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