Peace Train to Freedom Dear Richie Havens R.I.P

[Antagenet]

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=3T_bowzT8tw

A great soul is free from earth, may Richie Havens be filled with bliss.


A few hours later... I found myself so moved by the passing of this beautiful sensitive musician, that I cried for a few hours. There was something in his voice
that completely transported me. Spirit and Love.

The first concert I ever went to was Richie Havens. I was 15. He gave me hope, a sense of profound humanity and appreciation of the good men in this world.

Thankyou Richie

[Antagenet]

RIchie in his own words, an interview from the July 20th, 1968 issue of Rolling Stone.

Richie connected this "uneven distribution of awareness" to the inability of parents and the "older generation" to really appreciate what is happening in contemporary music and in the life of their children in general. "The parents themselves lack what they taught their children to have. The kids are taught respect and manners and honesty, and then they grow up in a world which doesn't give this to them. So they rebel.

"But now people are getting to know. Everybody is starting to do what they're supposed to do. Astrology, zen – it all ties in. People are contributing to each other on the astrological level; giving mind, body, and soul. Giving life. They're always been doing it, but now they're starting to be aware of it. This is new."

For himself, Richie Havens has an unlimited future without substantive ambitions or drive. "Everything I want to do, and to accomplish," he says, "is on the other side of the universe. That's peace of mind, energy, freedom. And I'm making myself ready to go, joyfully and willingly.

"I think I'm ready to be everybody's friend, and to do anything for anybody. It's heavy."




http://www.rollingstone.com/music/ne...#ixzz2REdwjDXL

[crosby]

this is one of my favorites:

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=VBbXKsKXyNU

RIP.
warmest, corson

[Antagenet]

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=LacsWzhD1QI

Richie Havens singing... wow I just found this, never saw it before.

Twitter is buzzing with people giving their love to him. heartening.

[shijo]

another beautiful person gone.i grew up with his music, check out the double album Richard P havens 1983. made in 1968 or 9.Still relevant and brilliant today,R.I.P. Ritchie.

[conk]

Way back then, even through the Hendrix, Zeppelin, and others that I favored, he stood out. RIP dear man.

[Carmody]

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=rynxqdNMry4

(the only one on yootoob with the correct pitch)

~~~~~~~~~~

Richie Havens, the New York City folk singer thrust by circumstance onto center stage as the opening act of Woodstock, the legendary 1969 music festival.

Scheduled fifth on the program for opening day of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, Aug. 15, 1969, Havens and two members of his band were pressed into urgent service as other musicians -- including the planned opening act, the folk-rock band Sweetwater -- fought traffic on the roads leading to Max Yasgur’s farm in Bethel, New York, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) from Woodstock, New York.

Havens had been among the first to arrive at the performers’ staging area in nearby Liberty, New York. As the afternoon wore on and the crowd, estimated at 500,000 people, waited for the show to begin, concert organizers persuaded Havens, along with his guitarist, Paul Williams, and his drummer, Daniel Ben Zebulon, to squeeze into a helicopter with their two conga drums and two guitars for the quick ride to the festival stage.

“I had the least instruments and the least guys,” Havens explained in a 2008 interview with Bloomberg Television, “and they said, ‘Richie, would you go over now?’ I said, ‘Yeah, it’s about time, I’ve been here since 5 o’clock in the morning.’”

Having gotten Havens to the stage, concert organizers implored him to kick off the festival.


“It had to be Richie -- I knew he could handle it, and his powerful but calm demeanor was just what we needed to set the tone for liftoff,” Michael Lang, a co-creator of the Woodstock festival, recalled in “The Road to Woodstock,” his 2009 book. “Regardless of what he said, he was ready and needed the least preparation and gear. When he saw me coming, Richie looked scared, and tried to walk away.”

Havens and his band mates opened Woodstock shortly after 5 p.m. with “Minstrel From Gault.” After their regular set, they did multiple encores to buy time for fellow performers still struggling to reach the site.

“Like the trouper he was, he just kept going and going,” Lang wrote. “He’d get up to leave the stage and we’d send him back. He didn’t have a set list to draw from -- but returned with song after song, and his band followed along. Finally, drenched with sweat, he gave us the look that this -- his sixth or seventh encore -- was it.”


Before that final encore, Havens painstakingly tuned his guitar while brainstorming what he had left to play. He told the crowd, “Freedom is what we’re all talking about getting. It’s what we’ve been looking for. I think this is it.”

As Havens recalled for Lang’s book:

“I start strumming my guitar and the word freedom comes out of my mouth as FREE-dom, FREE-dom, with a rhythm of its own. My foot takes over and drives my guitar into a faster, more powerful rhythm. I don’t know where this is going, but it feels right and somehow I find myself blending it into an old song -- ‘Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child’ -- a great spiritual my grandmother used to sing to me as a hymn when I was growing up in Brooklyn.”

Havens’s improvised song -- which went in part, “Freedom! Freedom! Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, a long way from my home” -- became a landmark anthem of the three-day Woodstock event, which included performances by Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Janis Joplin, Ravi Shankar, and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.


The song became an international hit after it was featured in the 1970 Woodstock documentary film. Director Quentin Tarantino introduced the song to a new generation by including it in “Django Unchained” (2012).

[mahalall]

Memory arose yesterday, of the summer moment in 1989, of the Sunrise, when 20,000 people illegally partying in a field in Cambridge, England-experimenting on mass with MDMA when that piano started !
The great man might have frowned but boy!, God bless

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=puDtxG9FBLQ