Richard P. "Richie" Havens (born January 21, 1941) is an American folk singer and guitarist.[1] He is best known for his intense rhythmic guitar style (in open tuning), soulful covers of pop and folk songs, and his opening performance at the 1969 Woodstock Festival.
Born in Brooklyn, Havens was the eldest of nine children. At an early age, he began organizing his neighborhood friends into street corner doo-wop groups and was performing with The McCrea Gospel Singers at 16. At the age of 20, Richie left Brooklyn to seek out the artistic stimulation of Greenwich Village. “I saw the Village as a place to escape to in order to express yourself,” he recalls. “I had first gone there during the beatnik days of the 1950s to perform poetry, then I drew portraits for 2 years and stayed up all night listening to folk music in the clubs. It took a while before I thought of picking up a guitar.”
Havens' reputation as a solo performer soon spread beyond the Village folk circles. After joining forces with manager Albert Grossman, Havens landed his first record deal with the Verve label, which released Mixed Bag in 1967. This debut album featured tracks like “Handsome Johnny” (co-written by Havens and future Oscar-winning actor Louis Gossett Jr.), “Follow”, and a version of Bob Dylan’s “Just Like A Woman”. By 1969, he had released five more albums (Something Else Again (1968) became Havens' first album to hit the Billboard chart and also pulled Mixed Bag onto the charts).
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