On This Day in 2013, We Said Goodbye to the Folk Singer Forever Immortalized in Woodstock History (Thanks to a Traffic Jam)

For three drizzly days in August 1969, more than 400,000 people descended upon a dairy farm roughly 90 miles northwest of New York City for the first-ever Woodstock Music Art and Fair. The massive crowds would prove serendipitous for Richie Havens. The folk-blues singer died on this day (April 22) in 2013 of a heart attack at age 72.

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Initially scheduled as the fifth act of the first day, Havens found himself opening the festival when the four acts ahead of him got stuck in a massive traffic jam. “My band had made it up from Manhattan in the early morning hours, and we had the least amount of gear to set up, so after some strong convincing from the promoters I agreed to go on,” Havens recalled on the festival’s 40th anniversary in 2009.

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Just 28 years old at the time, Havens proceeded to play “every song I knew” for 50 minutes. Along with his own compositions, that included the Beatles’ “With a Little Help from My Friends”, “Strawberry Fields Forever”, and “Hey Jude”.

At the end of his set, stalling for time, Havens began riffing off the traditional spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child”. Building off that, he improvised one of his most famous compositions, “Freedom”, right there onstage.

“I’d already played every song I knew and I was stalling, asking for more guitar and mic, trying to think of something else to play–and then it just came to me… The establishment was foolish enough to give us all this freedom and we used it in every way we could,” he later told Music-Room’s Cliff Smith.

Richie Havens Became a Generational Icon

Born Jan. 21, 1941, Richard Pierce “Richie” Havens grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, New York.

He began singing with street-corner doo-wop groups around age 12, joining the McCrea Gospel Singers at 14. By 20, he had migrated to Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, the epicenter of the city’s flourishing countercultural movement.

After signing with Bob Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, Havens released his debut album, Mixed Bag, in 1966. His opening performance at Woodstock expanded Havens’ reach across the globe. Two years later, he landed his only Top 20 entry, a soul-tinged spin on the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun”.

[RELATED: The Song You Didn’t Know Louis Gossett Jr. Co-Wrote with Richie Havens in the Late ’60s]

In addition to landing acting roles in the 1972 stage production of The Who’s Tommy and the 1974 film Catch My Soul, Havens ventured into other media. He wrote and performed commercial jingles for Amtrak, Maxwell House Coffee and the cotton industry.

Additionally, Havens co-founded the North Wind Undersea Institute, a hands-on oceanic children’s museum in the Bronx.

Featured image by Tucker Ranson/Archive Photos/Getty Images