(CNN) -- Famed folk singer Richie Havens, the opening act at the 1969 Woodstock music festival, died Monday of a sudden heart attack, his publicist said. He was 72.
Havens, who retired three years ago, toured for more than 30 years and recorded 30 albums. Havens told Billboard
that his breakthrough at Woodstock came after another artist's equipment
got stuck in traffic. He was supposed to be the fifth act.
"It was 5 o'clock and
nothing was happening yet," Havens told Billboard. "I had the least
instruments (to set up on stage) and the least people (in his band)."
So Havens went on and performed for 40 minutes, as planned. Organizers asked him to do four more songs, he told Billboard. "I went back and did
that, then it was, 'Four more songs...' and that kept happening 'til two
hours and 45 minutes later, I had sung every song I know," he said.
Havens, a Brooklyn, New
York, native, told CNN in 1999 that music enabled him to leave his rough
neighborhood to head to Greenwich Village and the music scene there.
Music was always a part of his life. "I believe I inherited my
sense of music from my father. My father was an ear piano player; he
could just hear something and play it," he recalls. "I came up in
Brooklyn singing doo-wop music from the time I was 13 to the time I was
20. That music served a purpose of keeping a lot of people out of
trouble, and also it was a passport from one neighborhood to another."
His inspiration for
songs about social change and protest came when he heard artists like
Fred Neil, Dino Valenti and Tom Paxton. That's when he knew what he
wanted to do with his life. "It was the songs that
actually changed my life," he says. "The songs that I heard were so much
different than the doo-wop kind of thing. They were just so powerful.
Finally I decided, 'I've got to do this.'" Before Woodstock, his nights were filled with playing as often as possible to make a few dollars. "We played three
coffeehouses a night, 14 sets a night, 20-minute sets, pass the basket,
stay alive," he told CNN. "I was there seven and a half years, every
day. It was the most incredibly magic, magic time."
After Havens gained
attention at Woodstock, he recorded a soulful-voiced cover of the
Beatles' "Here Comes the Sun," which rose on the pop charts in 1970.
Stephen Stills of
Crosby, Stills and Nash said Havens was an inspiration for the natural
gravel in his singing voice. He called Havens a passionate performer. "He lit fire when he
started playing within the first song and burned exactly the same way
throughout his set. And it never stopped, it never changed," Stills
said. He added that he thought Havens' style was probably a little too arcane to appeal to a mass audience. "But he sure knew what
to do when they were begging for someone to go on first, when all those
people showed up at Woodstock," Stills said. Havens returned to Woodstock for the 40th anniversary festival in 2009.
"While his family
greatly appreciates that Richie's many fans are also mourning this loss,
they do ask for privacy during this difficult time," a statement from
his publicist, Carrie Lombardi, said. Billboard reported Havens died in New Jersey, leaving behind four daughters and five grandchildren.
