Remembering Richie Havens

by Dada Vedaprajinananda

Richie Havens, one of the greatest contemporary American   folk singers, passed away this week and his passing made me remember him, his unique music and my own evolution in the 1960s.

Sometime in 1967 or 1968 I was sitting in a coffee house on my college campus and I heard a record playing Richie Havens’ version of “Just Like a Woman.”  It was a track from his album “Mixed Bag.”  The pleasing melody of Bob Dylan’s song and Richie Havens’ comforting voice really struck me and I liked it immediately.
I say “comforting” voice because that is the way I feel when I listen to Richie Havens.  In this week when Havens has passed away I have read several articles about his passing and his voice has been described as “raspy” and “craggy.”  But that is not how I hear him.  His voice is guttural, no doubt, but very warm and soothing.

Maybe that’s why one of my college friends remarked “anyone who listens to Richie Havens has to like him.” He had a style that appealed to a wide range of musical tastes.

On the first song that I heard that night in the coffee house, I was attracted by his unique voice and soon bought the album.  Listening to Havens later I also noted the distinct sound of his guitar.  In those days I never saw him play live so I didn’t know how he made that sound.  Also, I was just beginning to play guitar so I wouldn’t have understood the mechanics or the musical theory of this technique.

Many years later I was able to watch videos of the Woodstock music festival, and still later YouTube videos, and saw that Havens plays the guitar in his own way. He doesn’t use standard tuning. Rather, he mostly uses Open D Tuning, with all the strings tuned to form a D chord.  With that tuning as a base, he forms chords mostly using his thumb and he slides up and down the whole fret board of the guitar, while his right hand strums a frenetic up and down rhythm.

He used to put a lot into his guitar playing and worked up quite a sweat.  The films of Woodstock show him with sweat all over the back of his gown. This was a result of his intense performance style and also because he was on stage for more than two hours that day.  The audience called him back for encores, but he also had to go back on stage because the other performers who were supposed to open the festival were stuck in traffic and he was the only artist on site.

The open D tuning also gives his guitar sound a droning characteristic, and on his second major release “Something Else Again” Havens also played sitar  and his songs really had a mystical feel.  I listened to this album while I was experimenting with psychedelic drugs and I felt that Havens was somehow singing to me personally in the song “No Opportunity Necessary, No Experience Needed.”

Singing to me personally?  That feeling was partly caused by the paranoia inducing aspect of the drug that I was on at the time.  But Havens did speak to and for my generation.  His song “Handsome Johnny” about the futility of war struck a chord in young men concerned about the Vietnam War, and his improvised, composed-on-the fly Woodstock performance of “Freedom” was an apt anthem for a decade in which the Civil Rights movement transformed the American scene.

In the years after 1970 I didn’t follow Havens’ career as I just didn’t listen to much popular music for many years, especially when I was abroad from 1977-2008.  However, I have since looked back on his career and was quite pleased to find that over the years he immersed himself in environmental and social justice causes.  Here was a man who was a wonderful musician, was socially engaged, and just exuded love and spirituality.  What more could we want from any artist?