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.

A Mixed Bag

He cut some songs in the early to mid-’60s, but it was his 1967 and 1968 albums, Mixed Bag and Something Else Again, that revealed his own growing consciousness, as well as the imprint of Fred Neil, whose strong strumming style and suspended notes echo through Havens’ own work. Tangling with war and the civil rights issues on “Handsome Johnny” (the lyrics were written by his friend, actor Lou Gossett, Jr., himself a onetime Village folkie), he also took on “The Klan.” He laid down his famous version of Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman”, the song which he says personally illuminated the multi-dimensionality of womankind for him. Simone would go on to perform the Havens song “No Opportunity Necessary, No Experience Needed;” it was her commitment to dynamic, emotional song interpretation that also freed Havens to sing the songs of others in whatever mode moved him. And though Simone’s music defied boundaries, by virtue of his acoustic guitar strumming, Havens is most often put into the folk or folk-rock bag.

“All music is folk music,” says Havens. “There is a folk-music quality to my generation’s rock ‘n’ roll. We were singing about things without thinking of them as social commentary.” Then, as now, if Havens has an overriding message, it concerns freedom, something that he says “we are supposed to have already.”

“Freedom” is the name of Haven’s best-known song, the one that famously evolved out of an improvisation at the end of his accidental three-hour opening set at Woodstock. He and his two-man group were meant to be fourth on the bill, but they were thrown on stage as the first because, unlike some of the other acts, Havens and company were present and accounted for, easy to set up, and all importantly, had not ingested the infamous brown acid.

“I went and did my 40 minutes, I walked off and they said, ‘Richie, can you do about four more songs?’ No one was there to go on. I went back and sang the four songs. I walked off. ‘Richie… four more?’ They did that six times until I realized, I don’t have another song. I’m done. I’ve sung every song I know. It’s two hours and forty-five minutes later… and that’s when I start that long intro, that’s me trying to figure out what I’m going to play, and I yell out the thing about the guitar microphone… please, let me stall a little bit more!”

After about a minute of freelancing a percussive riff in his distinctive open-D tuning, accompanied by an Afro-Cuban conga beat, he cried the word “freedom,” and then repeated it eight more times. “I just went with that… all of a sudden, ‘Motherless Child’ came out. I hadn’t sung that song in 14 or 15 years. I used to sing it early on in the Village.” He also slipped in a couple of secularized verses from a song he calls “I Got a Telephone in My Bosom” (a variation on the song that became known as “Jesus is on the Mainline”), which he learned during a brief gospel education. And though he was in a state of improvisational ecstasy, Havens could still sense that by participating in Woodstock, he was taking part in history.

“They can’t hide us anymore” was the thought that went through his head upon seeing the masses at Max Yasgur’s Farm that day. At first observing the scene through the floorboards of the helicopter that was delivering him to the gig, and later from his vantage point on the stage, “I thought, ‘when the pictures come out in the newspaper, they’ll see we are now above ground. We’re no longer relegated to the underground.’”

The Here and Now

Part of Havens’ method for delivering his message remains through singing the work of others. On Nobody Left to Crown, he finally got around to recording Jackson Browne’s “Lives in the Balance”, an urgent missive on the human cost of war that he’s been performing for some time now. He also pulls out a show-stopping version of the Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”

“I wanted to do it right after it came out, I loved it so much, but I thought, ‘it doesn’t need to be said twice—the Who’s done it.’ I held that in a box—my hold it box. It took this long to come back around and it fit.”