Richie Havens - Freedom (2009 Remastered Version)

I know I'm late on this, but I got it. Woodstock Legend Richie Havens passed away on Monday last week. So, I'm posting this in his memory.

Richie Havens is an American folk singer and guitarist. 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).

Havens’ reputation as a live performer earned him widespread notice. His Woodstock appearance proved to be a major turning point in his career. As the festival’s first performer, he held the crowd for nearly three hours (in part because he was told to perform a lengthy set because many artists were delayed in reaching the festival location), and called back for several encores. Having run out of tunes, he improvised a song based on the old spiritual “Motherless Child” that became “Freedom”. The subsequent Woodstock movie release helped Havens reach a worldwide audience. His also appeared at the Isle of Wight Festival in September 1969, and the following year.

Following the success of his Woodstock performance, Richie started his own record label, Stormy Forest, and delivered Stonehenge in 1970. Later that year came Alarm Clock, which yielded the hit single “Here Comes The Sun”, and became Havens’ first album to reach Billboard’s Top 30 Chart. Stormy Forest went on to release four more of his own albums: The Great Blind Degree (1971), Live On Stage (1972), Portfolio (1973), and Mixed Bag II (1974). Memorable television appearances included performances on The Ed Sullivan Show and The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. On the latter program, the audience reacted with such enthusiasm that when the applause continued even after the commercial break, Johnny Carson asked Havens to return the following night.

This version of Freedom was taken from the 6 CD Boxset, Woodstock: 40 Years on: Back to Yasgur's Farm, which came out in 2009. This was the best remastered version I ever heard. You can hear him loud and clear! R.I.P. Richie.